International Keyboard Layouts

By Xah Lee. Date: 2010-11-04. Last updated: 2023-03-23.

Intro to International Keyboard Layouts

here's a introduction of keyboard layouts used around the world.

For latin-alphabet based languages, basically you have 3 major types:

QWERTY → used in USA, Canada, UK, Northern Europe (Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark)
QWERTZ → used in Germany, and some central and eastern euro countries.
AZERTY → used in France mostly.

Each of the above has minor variations, to allow you to input special characters such as é

Some countries have their own special layout that's not based on {QWERTY, QWERTZ, AZERTY}, but these are not popular.
There are also special ergo layouts, such as dvorak (for English), bepo (for French), neo (for German), and many others, usually mulitple for a specific language. These are not popular. Usually used less than 0.1% of people of that language.

For non-latin alphabet languages, in general, the most popular input system or keyboard layout is one based on QWERTY with a input system on top. This is for for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian.