International Keyboard Layouts

By Xah Lee. Date: 2010-11-04. Last updated: 2024-05-02.

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 Layout → used in USA, Canada, UK, Northern Europe (Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark)
QWERTZ Layout → used in Germany, and some central and eastern euro countries.
AZERTY Layout → 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 Keyboard Layout (for English), Bepo Layout (French) (for French), NEO Layout (Year 2004) (for German), Portuguese Ergonomic Keyboard Layout: pt-Nativo and many others, usually multiple 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.