French Keyboard Layouts
There are many keyboard layouts for French language:
- French AZERTY layout, used in France.
- New French Keyboard Layout 2019. Created by the French government.
- French Canadian layout. Based on QWERTY layout.
- Canadian Multilingual layout. Based on QWERTY layout.
- Several ergonomic layouts for French.
French AZERTY Layout

[see Alt Graph Key, Compose Key, Dead Key]
Note:
- The number row is Inverted. To type numbers, you have to press Shift key.
- Odd position of m
French AZERTY Layout is Bad
The French AZERTY Layout, is one of the most inefficient layout possible.
2017-07-19 Max P said:
Besides swapping A Q and placing the period on shift semicolon, the AZERTY layout is incredibly idiotic for at least its placement of accents:
① the letter ù is at QWERTY's apostrophe ' place, very convenient to hit. The problem is that this letter is used in only one word, “où” (meaning “where”), and nowhere else. At the same time, the most common accented letter é is at key 2. I think it's more common than many consonants, often there are several é's in one word (préférée, réélu etc.)
② But if you hit Shift+ù or Shift+é , you get % and 2, respectively, instead of uppercase letters. To type uppercase Ù, you have to press AltGraph+7 , then Shift+u . There is no way to type uppercase É.
③ There's a dedicated dead circumflex ^ and diaeresis ¨ key to the right of p . This is a good design: circumflex can be paired with any vowel ( î ê ô û â ), yet is not very frequent; diaeresis is much less common and it's ok to put in on shifted key. Then they decided to add dead key with grave ` accent, doubling à è ù keys, and for whatever reason dead nasalization symbol the tilde ~, which is not used in French at all! But there's no dead acute accent ´ , used for the most common é letter.
Because of this design, many french people now think that uppercase letters are never written with diacritics, which is not right. That's sad.
New French Keyboard Layout 2019
Canadian French Layout
The Canadian French layout is based on QWERTY layout.
Canadian French layout is much better that AZERTY French, but still not very efficient.
French Ergonomic Keyboard Layouts
Canadian Multilingual Layout
French Letter Frequency
How do French people type accents?
I asked a friend in France how they type those accents. Here's his reply.
most people use AZERTY's accents on the first row:
- 2 → é
- 7 → è
- 9 → ç
- 0 → à
for the rest there is ù key beside m and
- ¨ e → ë
- ˆ e → ê
Using Dvorak layout on OS X i use the associative chars [ ` ´ ¨ ˆ ˆ ]+[aoeui].
all the people i know, engineers/scientists tend to stick with AZERTY,while some geeks/coders are using QWERTY/Maltron.some authors use BEPO.
[from [2017-04-30 https://twitter.com/Ryuutei ]]
[see Maltron Keyboard]
when in online chat, do people bother to type é è à etc properly? or do they just use e a?
Depends on the person but most of the time they type the accents, even when it's not really useful like: 'télé'(TV)
it seems awful to type all those accents. Is there some auto-add-accent in word processor or such?
I'm amazed how French are not annoyed by having to always go upthere. In word proccessors yes auto-correct takes care of invariable accents.
Keyboard Layouts
Ergonomic keyboard Layouts
Thumb Keyboard Layouts- Most Efficient Layout?
- Maltron vs Dvorak
- Colemak vs Workman
- Typing Multi Layouts
Dvorak
Dvorak Layout- Hardware vs Software Dvorak
- Myth of QWERTY vs Dvorak
- Dvorak vs Programer's Dvorak
- Dvorak vs Colemak
- List of Dvorak Keyboards
- Qwerty to Dvorak, A PhD thesis, 1978
International
International Layouts- QWERTZ, AZERTY
German
German Ergonomic
French- New French Layout
French Ergonomic- French Letter Frequency
Russian- Russian Layout and Programing
- Portuguese Ergonomic
Chinese Input Methods- Pinyin Letter Frequency 拼音字母頻率
Japanese Input Method
Japanese Layouts- Japanese Char Frequency