French Keyboard Layouts

By Xah Lee. Date: . Last updated: .

There are many keyboard layouts for French language:

French AZERTY Layout

New French Keyboard Layout 2019

Canadian French Layout

Canadian French kbd
Canadian French keyboard layout. [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KB_Canadian_French_text.svg ]

The Canadian French layout is based on QWERTY layout.

Canadian French layout is much better that AZERTY French, but still not very efficient.

Canadian Multilingual Layout

French Ergonomic Keyboard Layouts: dvorak-fr, bepo, bvofrak

French Letter Frequency

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:

  • 2é
  • 7è
  • 9ç
  • 0à

for the rest there is ù key beside m and

  • ¨ eë
  • ˆ eê

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 French AZERTY Layout ,while some geeks/coders are using QWERTY/Maltron [see Maltron Keyboard] .some authors use Bepo Layout (French) .

[from https://twitter.com/Ryuutei]

[see Maltron Keyboard]

[see Maltron vs Dvorak keyboard Layout]

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 up there. In word proccessors yes auto-correct takes care of invariable accents.

International Layouts


Western Europe Layouts



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