7/25/2023 0 Comments French keyboard layout qwerty![]() ![]() In this post I’ll describe three different workarounds that will make it much easier to find the accents you need. But what if you do find you need them? Maybe you’re studying French or resident there, or a native French speaker stuck with a QWERTY system. Since that keyboard is designed around the frequency of letters and characters used in English (and there are some US and UK differences, in the main they are the same) obviously there’s unlikely to be any reason to access the many accented letters used in the French alphabet. In systems set up for French speakers, its far simpler because they have a AZERTY keyboard, which gives quick access to the characters and symbols that are needed.įor English-speakers, our systems are shipped by default with a QWERTY keyboard – so called because the first six characters on the keyboard are Q-W-E-R-T and Y. The layout will almost certainly still adhere to France’s current AZERTY layout, but a Dvorak-based alternative called BÉPO has supporters and was cited in the culture ministry’s report.īelow we take a look at the wide variety of keyboards offered in many languages, standard and non-standard.If you’re using a computer designed for the English-speaking market, be that US, International or English-English, it can be a challenge to type French accented characters. The deadline for a proposed layout would be this summer. ![]() The next step to a standardized keyboard, the ministry said, would be for France’s standards organization AFNOR (or the Association Française de Normalisation) to study the best layout for a French-language keyboard. Regional languages that fall under France’s domain-like Occitan, Catalan, Breton, and Polynesian-are also too hard to type, the ministry said, citing the absence of keys for an assortment of symbols unique to those languages. “It is almost impossible to write in French correctly with a keyboard marketed in France,” the ministry wrote. But autocorrect isn’t a panacea, and the rules of the language would be better preserved with a standardized keyboard, the ministry argued. The French culture and communication ministry admitted that software can often overcome the limitations of the physical keyboard, and autocorrect goes a long way in helping French writers add accents to capital letters. Similarly, AZERTY keyboards rarely allow easy or obvious access to the symbols that French writing uses for quotation marks (« ») forcing writers to use the English quotations we’re familiar with. While anyone would understand that the word spelled “oeufs” is actually “œufs,” the ministry is opposed to such concessions. The key for the ligature "œ” is inconsistent or non-existent among keyboards in France, although it’s the symbol traditionally used to write words like “œufs” (eggs) or “œuvre” (work). A report from the ministry asserted that the "hardware limitations" of the French AZERTY keyboard "have even led some of our fellow citizens to think that we should not accentuate capital letters.”Įqually, certain idiosyncrasies of the French language are lost on French language keyboards, leading French speakers to adopt more anglicized ways of writing. Often, an accent is the only distinguishing factor between two similarly spelled words. The trouble of finding how to properly capitalize accented letters is a big issue in written French, especially for legal texts and government documents where every letter of the names of people and businesses are capitalized. While the 26 letters of the alphabet as well as common accented letters like é, à, è, and ù are generally represented similarly on an AZERTY keyboard, the ministry said that symbol and the € symbol are inconveniently or inconsistently placed, as are commands to capitalize symbols like "ç". ![]() In a statement released this week, the ministry lamented the fact that French keyboards, which use the AZERTY layout rather than the QWERTY layout familiar to English speakers, make it unnecessarily difficult to type common symbols and letters. This week, France’s culture and communication ministry acknowledged that residents of the country faced similar frustrations when using different keyboards within their own country, a problem the ministry said it would begin trying to solve. That quick e-mail to mom just became a hunt-and-peck chore that will send you back to the cafe’s counter a couple of times to re-up the reservation at your terminal. If you’ve done some world traveling, you may know the frustration of sitting down in an Internet cafe, expecting to type out a message, only to realize that the keys on the computer’s keyboard are nothing like the ones from your home country.
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