We call the common keyboard used in English-speaking countries the qwerty keyboard, based on the first six letters of the top row. Via Wikipedia, I found that cetain other languages have slightly different keyboards:
qwertz German
azerty French[sup]1[/sup]
qzerty Italian
How about other languages? What do Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, Polish, Turkish, etc. speakers use?
Also, how many different alphabets do they make keyboards for? Do they make them for Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, and other alphabets?
[sup]1[/sup] Why did the French move the very common letter A up to the end of the top row where it’s so hard to get to?
Spanish-language keyboards put the n with the squiggle on top–the seperate letter that makes the “ni” sound in English “onion”–to the immediate right of the L.
Japanese keyboards look like this. I don’t think I’ve ever actually met someone who actually used the kana symbols on the keyboard, though; everyone types in romanized Japanese instead. The biggest practical difference is the moving of a number of punctuation marks… having to hit Shift-7 to get an apostrophe can be annoying.
Yeah, that’s just a holdover from typewriter days when the only way to use one was to type everything in kana. Only really old farts, the kind who wouldn’t know how to turn a computer on, would have learned how to type using that layout. The punctuation movement really ticks me off, especially since it doesn’t seem to have any practical reason whatsoever.
The other posters have answered re key assignments in other languages. I’d like to add that the commonly used names of these keyboard assignments aren’t necessarily analogs of “qwerty keyboard”. This not the case e.g. in German where the key assignment is qwertz but we usually refer to a German keyboard (or to a typewriter keyboard when contrasted to a abcdef keyboard as found on some calculators, control systems etc.).
Wikipedia has an article on Keyboard layouts with graphics for a lot of different types. IBM offers a more complete list, but you have to click on each language individually to see the images.
