Interface Overview - Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.1 for Effective MySQL Management - page 45

For an introduction to collations, see http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/
Charset-general.htm , and for a more technical explanation of the algorithms
involved, refer to http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr10/ .
Unicode and UTF-8
Unicode is an industry standard designed to allow text and symbols […] to be
consistently represented and manipulated by computers.
For more information, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode and
http://www.unicode.org.
Unicode currently supports more than 600 languages, which is its main advantage
over other character sets available with ISO or Windows. This is especially important
with a multi-language product like phpMyAdmin.
To represent or encode these Unicode characters, many Unicode Transformation
Formats ( UTF ) exist. A popular transformation format is UTF-8, which uses one to
four octets per character. For more details, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
UTF-8 .
Note that the browser must support UTF-8 (as most current browsers do). The
phpMyAdmin distribution kit includes a UTF-8 version of every language file
in the lang subdirectory.
Language selection
A Language selector appears on the login panel (if any) and on the homepage. The
default behavior of phpMyAdmin is to use the language defined in our browser's
preferences, if there is a corresponding language file for this version.
The default language used—in case the program cannot detect one—is defined in
config.inc.php , in the $cfg['DefaultLang'] parameter with 'en-utf-8' . This
value can be changed. The possible values for language names are defined in the
libraries/select_lang.lib.php script as an array.
Even if the default language is defined, each user (especially on a multi-user
installation) can choose his/her preferred language from the selector. The user's
choice will be remembered in a cookie whenever possible.