New AZERTY French Keyboard Layout (2019)

By Xah Lee. Date: . Last updated: .

Frence has a new keyboard layout, designed by the French government. The project began in 2015 and completed in 2019. The new layout is called standard NF Z71-300.

french layout NF Z71-300 82mq french layout legend QWxjG
French new layout (standard NF Z71-300)

The project was launched at the end of 2015 on a proposal from the Délégation générale à la langue française et aux langues de France (Ministry of Culture), based on the observation that the current “azerty” keyboards constrain the writing of French, regional languages and European languages with a Latin alphabet.

For the first time, a standard (NF Z71-300) defines the placement of characters on the French keyboard. It describes two layouts, one of which closely follows the AZERTY keyboard used by most people who write in French. However, it is in many respects superior to the old keyboard :

The new AZERTY layout has been developed using computer algorithms. These are based on the results of the most recent research in the field of text input, on a large amount of French text data (including newspapers, programming code, and Twitter posts), and on large-scale studies of keyboard typing speed.

[2022-01-06 from http://norme-azerty.fr/en/]

french new layout kj5vb
keyboard with French new layout

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