The default character set

The default character set has been changed from latin1 to UTF8. UTF8 is the dominating character set, though it hadn't been a default one in prior versions of MySQL. Along with the character set default, collation has been changed from latin1_swedish_ci to utf8mb4_800_ci_ai. With these changes globally accepted, character sets and collations are now based on UTF8; one of the common reasons is because there are around 21 different languages supported by UTF8, which makes systems provide multilingual support.