Talk:AZERTY

lam characters
"It is impossible to produce lam characters É, Ç" It isn't with Windows keyboards. With Mac or Linux keyboard, you just have to enable caps lock and then press "é" or "ç" to produce "É" or "Ç".

cannot link to Commons image, had to copy it. Help please!
The photo did not seem sufficient to explain the text so I added the keyboard layout image. As a French user, have migrated the keyboard layout from the French Wiki to Wiki commons. This commons image will probably be cleaned up to get rid of blurrs around letters. I was not able to link to it from here, and had to copy it into the English Wiki. The risk is that any improvement to the commons image would not be transmitted to country Wikis, and vice versa. Is there a syntax for linking to Wiki commons? Please note that I am new to Wiki. --Paul Williams 21:05, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

PS I have a French typing course book, and will reference the article later.

Imprimerie nationale ?
No idea what a keyboard that follows those "Imprimerie nationale" standards looks like but with the PC102/PC105 French layout in XFree86/Xorg,

- you can get « and » with AltGr-z and AltGr-x resp.,

- you can get accented caps À Â Ä Ç É È Ê Ë Î Ï Ô Ö Ù Ü by using Shift-Alt-A/B/D/G/I/H/J/K/N/O/T/V/Y/!,

- you can get the above plus Û by switching caps-lock on before typing the corresponding accented lower-case letter.

This is not Linux-specific ; I expect that XFree86/Xorg will give you the same results with a PC102/PC105 keyboard on any other platform.

In the Linux console, the caps-lock method works but not the others.
 * Where the regular French (or Belgian) azerty don't have a level 3, xorg adds the symbols of the "common secondary group" ISO/IEC_9995 Entlantian (talk) 16:12, 27 August 2021 (UTC)

Euro-Key
Is there no key for the €-sign on French keyboards? 66.214.228.129 23:22, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
 * AltGr+E on a Windows Keyboard (and also Linux I think) and alt+$ with a Mac keyboard. 82.239.226.210 20:16, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

Why "AZ" instead of "QW"?
I understand the need for accent signs used in French, but what was the rationale behind the swapping of two pairs of letters ("A" for "Q" and "Z" for "W") and moving "M" from the QWERTY format? Funny hat 04:40, 20 January 2007 (UTC)


 * You're quite right. Some other things also jump to mind:
 * The article states that the ligature of o+e œ and Œ are used in the French language, although there are no corresponding keys.
 * Spanish and Italian are romance languages too, they use QWERTY nonetheless


 * My best guess is that these novelties are not _really_ aimed at improving typing speed but have much rather been invented to be different than the Americans (and, for that matter, the rest of the world). Trying to be different is a notorious feature of French policy making. The Dutch-speaking majority in Belgium (the 'Flemish') was "ruled" (i.e. "poorer", "subdued") a long time by the French-speaking minority and nobility until late 20th century. That might be why the Flemish also have to use this rather unusual keyboard lay-out. It would be more logical for them to adapt the Dutch QWERTY one. I, for one, stick to QWERTY because it does not necessitate me to push shift to put a point (and no shift for the semicolon). bluefish (talk) 00:49, 4 December 2008 (UTC)
 * Three main latin alphabet language economy from that time (1870) have three different based layout: qwerty (england/english), azerty (france/french), and qwertz (germany/german). (WikiRef: ). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.100.0.8 (talk) 16:08, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

The switch of letter comes from typewriters. The letters used most frequently consequently together in a language should be as far as possible from each other in a layout. There were several layout competing at the time AZERTY was adopt. Which one won is mostly a question of ability to type fast without blocking the the typewriter, and then probably because whoever sold AZERTY typewriters in France had a better marketing/price/sourcing/volume or something. So no, French people didn't just decide to be different. Specially because in the 50's (so just after the WWII) United-States were totally admired by french people, they just loved this country! A former american marine had a tremendous success selling gums in france because he branded it "Hollywood", and there is a whole history of some brand being successful because it was comming from america. Just to say :)Nobi24 (talk) 19:20, 22 April 2011 (UTC)


 * It seams pretty difficult to answer this question.
 * ‒ First I guess ayt that time global inflences were distinct. The main economy was the british one, and the main latin based, non english based economy was the french based one. (WikiRef: ).
 * ‒ Secondly, the root question is not why az insteed of qw, but indeed why az and qw? And can we trust sources which assumes azerty is a variation of qwerty? What were other layout in competition at that time?
 * ‒ Thirdly, cannot we consider that azerty is a bit nearer than qwerty from a possible previous layout with voyels on first line ond alphabetical keys in bidirectional order in two next lines?
 * At least, this feature sdoes not appear in the page which is the voyel on first line feature, making the same distinction there was in the baudot code:
 * According to qwerty page: In November 1868 he changed the arrangement of the latter half of the alphabet, O to Z, right-to-left. In April 1870 he arrived at a four-row, upper case keyboard approaching the modern QWERTY standard, moving six vowels, A, E, I, O, U, and Y, to the upper row as follows:

.)
 * Now it is true that Linux provides two main layouts for Belgium: “Belgian” and “Belgian (alt.)”. France also has two layouts, “French” and “French (alt.)”, which are analogous to the Belgian ones. All are extensions of the national AZERTY as printed on keyboards. Currently, Wikipedia documents only one layout for each country, and I’m not sure why. I’ve asked on the French talk page. Maëlan 23:58, 28 April 2024 (UTC)

Portuguese keyboard
It is true, and anyone can check on the layout's map, that the Portuguese layout has strictly better coverage of French spelling than vanilla AZERTYs, “Œœ” being the only character still missing, aside from typographic perfectionism (though lowercase accented vowels of French are less convenient to type, since they require dead keys). But: is this sentence an assertion that the Portuguese layout is actually used and preferred by some to type French? In which case, please provide reference. Personally, I have never seen or heard about anything like it in France or Belgium. Otherwise, this is just some Wikipedia editor’s astute observation, and I’m not sure it should be placed in this section which, apparently (?), aims at listing keyboard layouts which are used in France. Maëlan 21:45, 28 April 2024 (UTC)


 * The discussed paragraph was first written by back in 2007 (in the article Keyboard layout; it was later moved from there to here). Perhaps the said user (who seems to be Portuguese but does not speak French) could tell us more?). Maëlan 00:38, 29 April 2024 (UTC)
 * I edited the discussed paragraph. Maëlan 11:47, 3 May 2024 (UTC)