Talk:AZERTY

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lam characters[edit]

"It is impossible to produce lam characters É, Ç" It isn't with Windows keyboards. With Mac or Linux keyboard, you just have to enable caps lock and then press "é" or "ç" to produce "É" or "Ç".

cannot link to Commons image, had to copy it. Help please![edit]

The photo did not seem sufficient to explain the text so I added the keyboard layout image. As a French user, have migrated the keyboard layout from the French Wiki to Wiki commons. This commons image will probably be cleaned up to get rid of blurrs around letters. I was not able to link to it from here, and had to copy it into the English Wiki. The risk is that any improvement to the commons image would not be transmitted to country Wikis, and vice versa. Is there a syntax for linking to Wiki commons? Please note that I am new to Wiki. --Paul Williams 21:05, 14 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

PS I have a French typing course book, and will reference the article later.

Imprimerie nationale ?[edit]

No idea what a keyboard that follows those "Imprimerie nationale" standards looks like but with the PC102/PC105 French layout in XFree86/Xorg,

- you can get « and » with AltGr-z and AltGr-x resp.,

- you can get accented caps À Â Ä Ç É È Ê Ë Î Ï Ô Ö Ù Ü by using Shift-Alt-A/B/D/G/I/H/J/K/N/O/T/V/Y/!,

- you can get the above plus Û by switching caps-lock on before typing the corresponding accented lower-case letter.

This is not Linux-specific ; I expect that XFree86/Xorg will give you the same results with a PC102/PC105 keyboard on any other platform.

In the Linux console, the caps-lock method works but not the others.

Where the regular French (or Belgian) azerty don't have a level 3, xorg adds the symbols of the "common secondary group" ISO/IEC_9995#Common_secondary_group Entlantian (talk) 16:12, 27 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Euro-Key[edit]

Is there no key for the €-sign on French keyboards? 66.214.228.129 23:22, 3 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

AltGr+E on a Windows Keyboard (and also Linux I think) and alt+$ with a Mac keyboard. 82.239.226.210 20:16, 7 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Why "AZ" instead of "QW"?[edit]

I understand the need for accent signs used in French, but what was the rationale behind the swapping of two pairs of letters ("A" for "Q" and "Z" for "W") and moving "M" from the QWERTY format? Funny hat 04:40, 20 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

You're quite right. Some other things also jump to mind:
  • The article states that the ligature of o+e œ and Œ are used in the French language, although there are no corresponding keys.
  • Spanish and Italian are romance languages too, they use QWERTY nonetheless
My best guess is that these novelties are not _really_ aimed at improving typing speed but have much rather been invented to be different than the Americans (and, for that matter, the rest of the world). Trying to be different is a notorious feature of French policy making. The Dutch-speaking majority in Belgium (the 'Flemish') was "ruled" (i.e. "poorer", "subdued") a long time by the French-speaking minority and nobility until late 20th century. That might be why the Flemish also have to use this rather unusual keyboard lay-out. It would be more logical for them to adapt the Dutch QWERTY one. I, for one, stick to QWERTY because it does not necessitate me to push shift to put a point (and no shift for the semicolon). bluefish (talk) 00:49, 4 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Three main latin alphabet language economy from that time (1870) have three different based layout: qwerty (england/english) , azerty (france/french), and qwertz (germany/german). (WikiRef: [1]). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.100.0.8 (talk) 16:08, 29 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]


The switch of letter comes from typewriters. The letters used most frequently consequently together in a language should be as far as possible from each other in a layout. There were several layout competing at the time AZERTY was adopt. Which one won is mostly a question of ability to type fast without blocking the the typewriter, and then probably because whoever sold AZERTY typewriters in France had a better marketing/price/sourcing/volume or something. So no, French people didn't just decide to be different. Specially because in the 50's (so just after the WWII) United-States were totally admired by french people, they just loved this country! A former american marine had a tremendous success selling gums in france because he branded it "Hollywood", and there is a whole history of some brand being successful because it was comming from america. Just to say :)Nobi24 (talk) 19:20, 22 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]


It seams pretty difficult to answer this question.
‒ First I guess ayt that time global inflences were distinct. The main economy was the british one, and the main latin based, non english based economy was the french based one. (WikiRef: [2]).
‒ Secondly, the root question is not why az insteed of qw, but indeed why az and qw? And can we trust sources which assumes azerty is a variation of qwerty? What were other layout in competition at that time?
‒ Thirdly, cannot we consider that azerty is a bit nearer than qwerty from a possible previous layout with voyels on first line ond alphabetical keys in bidirectional order in two next lines?
At least, this feature sdoes not appear in the page which is the voyel on first line feature, making the same distinction there was in the baudot code:
According to qwerty page: In November 1868 he changed the arrangement of the latter half of the alphabet, O to Z, right-to-left.[1] In April 1870 he arrived at a four-row, upper case keyboard approaching the modern QWERTY standard, moving six vowels, A, E, I, O, U, and Y, to the upper row as follows:[2]

  2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 -
    A E I . ? Y U O ,
B C D F G H J K L M
Z X W V T S R Q P N

  1. ^ Koichi and Motoko Yasuoka: Myth of QWERTY Keyboard, Tokyo: NTT Publishing, 2008. pp.12-20
  2. ^ Koichi and Motoko Yasuoka: Myth of QWERTY Keyboard, Tokyo: NTT Publishing, 2008. pp.24-25

84.100.0.8 (talk) 16:03, 29 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

In Quebec[edit]

The article says: In Quebec the practice of initial capital accents is not generally followed. I'm from Quebec and my experience is that capital letters usually are accented. It often strikes me when reading French (France) material that they do not put accents on capital letters. Unless someone objects I'll change that.

While we're at it I would also replace "Quebec" with "French Canada" since the French language is not used in Quebec only. Saint 19:16, 12 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

some neighboring countries[edit]

I changed that to the admittedly rather uninformative some other countries since AZERTY layouts (with Latin and Arabic letters) seem to be used in the Maghreb countries as well, which are not exactly neighbours of France and Belgium. Feel free to improve the sentence. — Anothername 18:23, 20 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Yep, Tunisia do use them (former French protectorate). Perhaps a small list of countries where it is predominantly in use could be included in the article? 130.232.146.149 06:32, 6 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Bold text

what countries use it[edit]

"and it is used by most French speakers based in Europe, though France and Belgium each have their own national variations on the layout. The French speaking part of Switzerland uses the Swiss QWERTZ keyboard."

Once we have ruled out France, Belgium, and Switzerland haven't we ruled out most French speakers in Europe? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.104.24.156 (talk) 04:59, 9 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe you can add in that list that also Dutch speaking part of Belgium (Flanders) uses it. (Probably a relict from when French speakers had the power, like is already said.) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.176.196.154 (talk) 20:42, 29 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Letter frequency is a different issue to accented letters[edit]

It makes sense to use Azerty instead of Qwerty if their vocabulary is totally different.

But the intro line about Qwerty not being sufficient for languages with accented letters glosses over this fact.

You can just as well have a Qwerty keyboard with accented letters on the number and symbol keys.

It would still be sufficient, it just wouldn't necessarily be the most effective for the French language.

—Preceding unsigned comment added by 132.185.240.124 (talk) 11:31, 23 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Actually AZERTY and QWERTY are equally bad for any language, as wovels are in really awkward positions. German also has accented characters, and German-speaking countries use a slightly modified QWERTY (QWERTZ) layout with accented letters readily available without the use of dead keys. The adoption of AZERTY vs. QWERTY in the French-speaking world is purely incidental, and has no scientific basis. It might have been motivated by politics / national pride, not wanting to "follow" the Anglo-Saxon world. 38.125.36.194 (talk) 19:06, 20 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I was told by AFNOR people that the French change from QWERTY to AZERTY was probably done to circumvent the original Sholes patent (but I have no real citation to include this into the article text). I don’t know for the actual reason to use QWERTZ instead of QWERTY for German. btw, the German keyboard layout *uses* dead keys, but not for the frequent umlauts äöü wich have assigned their own keys. -- Karl432 (talk) 00:08, 21 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

General article concern[edit]

The end of this article is long and "rant-like" about the downfalls of Windows and its keyboard system. Perhaps this should be trimmed down or moved somewhere else...? --Evilspoons (talk) 21:03, 12 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

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In Belgium[edit]

In Belgium there is only AZERTY layout! Nvdk542 (talk) 19:52, 8 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Portugal uses QWERTY[edit]

Why is Portugal not green on the map? As far as I know everyone uses QWERTY in Portugal. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2001:8B0:B155:F32B:34C1:B323:5B6D:2E44 (talk) 23:08, 14 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Capital ç ?[edit]

I have an Azerty, so under the 9, I have the ç, but how do I make a "capital C-cedilla"? Crlr+shift+c opens up a window. Thy, SvenAERTS (talk) 12:14, 5 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Alt+9/ç. Tvx1 05:06, 1 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

All AZERTY variants aren't shown?[edit]

At times there are more options available when choosing an operating system's input method as shown in this screenshot of a Pop!_OS settings panel.

Can we get additional clarification? Like what's with "Latin-9 only" or "Wang 724"? NeoCognitron (talk) 12:27, 10 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Most of them are just minor variations provided by Xorg (the Linux keyboard driver, roughly speaking), and whose names speak for themselves:
  • “Wang 724” is for some old vendor's keyboard which, apparently, used to display two extra characters on its keys (a tilde on the top-left key, a broken bar on the bottom-left key); useless for you in 2024;
  • “latin-9 only” restricts the layout to the characters that exist in the latin-9 character set (so characters like “≤≠—™” are excluded); useless too;
  • “no dead keys” removes the dead keys (some people don't like them);
  • “ISO” permutes or replaces the AltGr characters of keys A, Z, Q, W, M, I don't know the story but I guess this is to conform to some ISO standard?
(I gathered the details by looking into the configuration file defining these layouts: /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/be.)
Now it is true that Linux provides two main layouts for Belgium: “Belgian” and “Belgian (alt.)”. France also has two layouts, “French” and “French (alt.)”, which are analogous to the Belgian ones. All are extensions of the national AZERTY as printed on keyboards. Currently, Wikipedia documents only one layout for each country, and I’m not sure why. I’ve asked on the French talk page. Maëlan 23:58, 28 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Portuguese keyboard[edit]

The Portuguese (Portugal) keyboard layout may also be preferred […]

It is true, and anyone can check on the layout's map, that the Portuguese layout has strictly better coverage of French spelling than vanilla AZERTYs, “Œœ” being the only character still missing, aside from typographic perfectionism (though lowercase accented vowels of French are less convenient to type, since they require dead keys). But: is this sentence an assertion that the Portuguese layout is actually used and preferred by some to type French? In which case, please provide reference. Personally, I have never seen or heard about anything like it in France or Belgium. Otherwise, this is just some Wikipedia editor’s astute observation, and I’m not sure it should be placed in this section which, apparently (?), aims at listing keyboard layouts which are used in France. Maëlan 21:45, 28 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The discussed paragraph was first written by Muukalainen (talk · contribs) back in 2007 (in the article Keyboard layout; it was later moved from there to here). Perhaps the said user (who seems to be Portuguese but does not speak French) could tell us more?). Maëlan 00:38, 29 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I edited the discussed paragraph. Maëlan 11:47, 3 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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