# Database Discussions > MySQL >  collation and "latin1_swedish_ci"?

## mahmood

Hi 
I have recently downloaded the most updated version of mysql, since then I get "latin1_swedish_ci" as the default collation. I had never noticed Collation before.

I use mysql for english language. Should I change the collation to another option? What option is the most broad one?

Thanks.

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## jazcyk

You can read about character sets and collations as of MySQL 4.1 here:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/charset-general.html
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/charset-mysql.html

The collations' support is necessary to support all the many written languages of the world.  For instance in my language (Danish) we have a special character 'æ'.  It sounds like Swedish, German, Hungarian (and more) 'ä' .  That character also appears in Danish with words imported form one of those languages.  Due to collations' support we can have both printed correctly and and the same sorted (ORDER BY ...) as being identical.  Without collations support that was not possible.

Swedish collations is the MySQL default for latin charsets.  It works fine with English.  English is so easy - it works with everything, because it has no special characters, accents etc.  But if you have another language that you use often (for instance Spanish) you could change collation to a Spanish one, so sorting of Spanish Strings would be correct according to Spanish language rules.

A very special example of a collation is one of the German ones.  It was created to allowed for sorting like in German phone books.  German phone books don't follow general rules of german language!

You can create your own collation if you like.  Collations can be compiled or text-format.

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