Why is MySQL's default collation latin1_swedish_ci?
The bloke who wrote it was co-head of a Swedish company.
Possibly for similar reasons, Microsoft SQL Server's default language us_english.
latin1_swedish_ci is a single byte character set, unlike utf8_general_ci.
Compared to latin1_general_ci it has support for a variety of extra characters used in European languages. So it’s a best choice if you don’t know what language you will be using, if you are constrained to use only single byte character sets.