# WTF is the deal with French keyboqrds
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wtf-is-the-deal-with-french-keyboqrds/689248
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [May 25, 2014, 11:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wtf-is-the-deal-with-french-keyboqrds/689248 "2014-05-25T23:29:51Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@pkbites](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pkbites)
#### Post date: [May 25, 2014, 11:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wtf-is-the-deal-with-french-keyboqrds/689248/1 "2014-05-25T23:29:51Z")
I’m in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés area of Paris right now. Perhaps I’ve been lucky but I’ve never come across an AZERTY keyboard before. Not even in Europe.
Does it have to do with the language? It took me 18 minutes to type\correct this post. I’m going nuts here.
---
### Author:  [@Batistuta](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Batistuta)
#### Post date: [May 25, 2014, 11:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wtf-is-the-deal-with-french-keyboqrds/689248/2 "2014-05-25T23:35:10Z")
The AZERTY layout has been around since the 19th century, so I guess it had something to do with the frequency of certain letters in the French language, and their effect on typewriters.
Thankfully for you, an alternative ZHJAY layout was considered for a while but eventually rejected. That would have been even worse, non?
---
### Author:  [@RadicalPi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RadicalPi)
#### Post date: [May 26, 2014, 12:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wtf-is-the-deal-with-french-keyboqrds/689248/3 "2014-05-26T00:05:35Z")
The AZERTY keyboard is standard in France and has been for at least a century. Keyboard standards vary from language to language as far as I can tell, and so, if you’ve never been to France, you’d never have seen it before.
Getting used to it takes some time. I worked in a French university with French keyboards while using my American laptop at home, and it took about six months to be able to shift back and forth without mixing up those damned A’s and Q’s.
---
### Author:  [@Kobal2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kobal2)
#### Post date: [May 26, 2014, 12:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wtf-is-the-deal-with-french-keyboqrds/689248/4 "2014-05-26T00:12:02Z")
AZERTY is indeed necessary for French - QWERTY doesn’t feature é è à ù or ç keys at all. All of which are common enough in written French that we couldn’t rely on Unicode fuckery alone to get to them.
It shouldn’t be too hard to write with one though - letters-wise the only differences are Z/W, A/Q and where the M is. The numbers row and the punctuation keys are all different though, that might be your issue ? I dunno, maybe it’s because I’m more used to it but many games default to a QWERTY input regardless of Windows settings or keyboard type and it never was a huge deal for me to use \*your \*weird keyboard setup :).
Oh, and welcome to Paris BTW !
---
### Author:  [@Kobal2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kobal2)
#### Post date: [May 26, 2014, 12:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wtf-is-the-deal-with-french-keyboqrds/689248/5 "2014-05-26T00:16:29Z")
(it’s in fact common enough that among the French gamer subculture, words are sometimes spelled with inverted q’s and a’s deliberately. You know about “pwn” or “teh” ? Same deal.)
---
### Author:  [@Little\_Pig](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Pig)
#### Post date: [May 26, 2014, 12:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wtf-is-the-deal-with-french-keyboqrds/689248/6 "2014-05-26T00:21:00Z")
Interesting. Germans and Swiss have their take on it too. Read all about it [here.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AZERTY)
---
### Author:  [@Digital\_is\_the\_new\_Analog](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Digital_is_the_new_Analog)
#### Post date: [May 26, 2014, 1:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wtf-is-the-deal-with-french-keyboqrds/689248/7 "2014-05-26T01:29:22Z")
Oh, if only I could tell you the amount of time I’ve spent dealing with keyboard choices, back in my days designing cell phones. Just the manufacturing issues…but that’s a story for another day.
The major western keyboards tend to be QWERTY, AZERTY, and QWERTZ. There are others for some of the Asian countries. I remember dealing with a Korean keyboard at one point, for instance.
Happily, I only had to type enough to verify that the keys acted properly.
---
### Author:  [@Heracles](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Heracles)
#### Post date: [May 26, 2014, 3:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wtf-is-the-deal-with-french-keyboqrds/689248/8 "2014-05-26T03:05:01Z")
> [@Kobal2](#):
>
> AZERTY is indeed necessary for French - QWERTY doesn’t feature é è à ù or ç keys at all. All of which are common enough in written French that we couldn’t rely on Unicode fuckery alone to get to them.
Nah, that’s just silly. AZERTY is used in France because touch typists in France have always used that layout. My French-Canadian keyboard is a QWERTY and I can type **é è à ù ô ç** etc. directly (they all require two keystrokes except for **é** , but there are alternate layouts with **à** and **è** as single keystrokes).
---
### Author:  [@Kobal2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kobal2)
#### Post date: [May 26, 2014, 3:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wtf-is-the-deal-with-french-keyboqrds/689248/9 "2014-05-26T03:44:51Z")
… and they’ve always used that layout because it was designed with French in mind. Which is why it’s got strategically placed, one keystroke accent keys.
Even two keystrokes per massively reduces output considering the frequency of these diacritics in French.
---
### Author:  [@panache45](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/panache45)
#### Post date: [May 26, 2014, 5:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wtf-is-the-deal-with-french-keyboqrds/689248/10 "2014-05-26T05:00:42Z")
Slight hijack here:
I know that in Hebrew, the vowels (those little doohickeys on the bottom) and still be legible to someone who’s fluent. I know that french accents serve a different purpose, but can someone fluent in French read/write without them?
---
### Author:  [@Kobal2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kobal2)
#### Post date: [May 26, 2014, 5:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wtf-is-the-deal-with-french-keyboqrds/689248/11 "2014-05-26T05:25:32Z")
Yes, absolutely.
Some words could become ambiguous (e.g. the past participle of the verb “créer”, to create, is “créé”. The first person singular present is “crée”. Remove the diacritics and they’d be spelled the same, even though they’re pronounced very differently and don’t mean the same thing) and so on. If you ran into an unknown word its pronunciation would be harder to determine without the accents. And of course it’d just \*look \*weird and make punctilious spellers such as yours truly pop a gasket :).
But it’d still be understandable French.
Hell, many of the diacritics are barely even necessary e.g. the semantic distinction between “ou” (or) and “où” (where) can be inferred from context 99% of the time, same for “a” (at [a location]) and “à” (which belongs to). Then there’s the historical holdovers, like the word “croûte” (a crust) in which the ^ doesn’t modify the pronunciation of the word in any way whatsoever and doesn’t mean anything other than “the word used to be crouste but now it’s not.”.
If you want a close-ish English equivalent, imagine reading a text with all the punctuation removed. It’d probably look like a mess, be a bit more difficult to parse and so on, but you could still read and understand its meaning in the grand majority of cases.
---
### Author:  [@RadicalPi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RadicalPi)
#### Post date: [May 26, 2014, 6:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wtf-is-the-deal-with-french-keyboqrds/689248/12 "2014-05-26T06:51:52Z")
> [@Kobal2](#):
>
> Yes, absolutely.
> … same for “a” (at [a location]) and “à” (which belongs to) …
Not to be too picky, but _a_ means “has”; both “at a location” and “which belongs to” are _à_.
---
### Author:  [@Kobal2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kobal2)
#### Post date: [May 26, 2014, 7:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wtf-is-the-deal-with-french-keyboqrds/689248/13 "2014-05-26T07:05:07Z")
Oops, yes, you’re absolutely correct. Well, this is an embarrassing brain fart…
---
### Author:  [@Tim\_T-Bonham.net](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tim_T-Bonham.net)
#### Post date: [May 26, 2014, 8:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wtf-is-the-deal-with-french-keyboqrds/689248/14 "2014-05-26T08:38:17Z")
> [@pkbites](#):
>
> Does it have to do with the language? It took me 18 minutes to type\correct this post. I’m going nuts here.
But why?
In either Windows or Linux, it takes about 30 seconds to change the keyboard scan pattern to whichever one you are used to (and 20 seconds of that is looking up how to do it). Then you can just type using the key locations as usual, and get the appropriate characters. Problem solved!
---
### Author:  [@blindboyard](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/blindboyard)
#### Post date: [May 26, 2014, 9:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wtf-is-the-deal-with-french-keyboqrds/689248/15 "2014-05-26T09:56:26Z")
Use Dvorak.
---
### Author:  [@Peter\_Morris](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Peter_Morris)
#### Post date: [May 26, 2014, 10:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wtf-is-the-deal-with-french-keyboqrds/689248/16 "2014-05-26T10:16:20Z")
> [@pkbites](#):
>
> Does it have to do with the language? It took me 18 minutes to type\correct this post.
And you \*still \*wrote ‘keyboqrds’
---
### Author:  [@Heracles](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Heracles)
#### Post date: [May 26, 2014, 11:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wtf-is-the-deal-with-french-keyboqrds/689248/17 "2014-05-26T11:33:50Z")
> [@panache45](#):
>
> Slight hijack here:
>
> I know that in Hebrew, the vowels (those little doohickeys on the bottom) and still be legible to someone who’s fluent. I know that french accents serve a different purpose, but can someone fluent in French read/write without them?
You can still make out the words, and [it’s certainly less dramatic than in Spanish](http://allthingshyper.tumblr.com/post/49551264346/purgatorystuck-mi-papa-tiene-47-anos-my-dad-is). In European French, capital letters are usually unaccented (NO ENTRY = ENTREE INTERDITE) and the signs remain legible.
But it does look strange for a normal mixed-case paragraph to have no accents at all. It happened a lot in the early 1980s, when many operating systems and primitive word processors only had English letters, but it’s never been acceptable to write a formal letter or, say, an advertising flyer without accents.
Today, around here at least, much texting is done without accents because it takes longer to type **é** on an iPhone or Android.
---
### Author:  [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)
#### Post date: [May 26, 2014, 12:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wtf-is-the-deal-with-french-keyboqrds/689248/18 "2014-05-26T12:19:24Z")
> [@Peter\_Morris](#):
>
> And you \*still \*wrote ‘keyboqrds’
Whoosh, I suspect. Or PM’s being ironic.
---
### Author:  [@even\_sven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/even_sven)
#### Post date: [May 26, 2014, 12:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wtf-is-the-deal-with-french-keyboqrds/689248/19 "2014-05-26T12:21:13Z")
Learn how to change they keyboard in Windows. It takes a second, and it will change your life.
---
### Author:  [@Donnerwetter](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Donnerwetter)
#### Post date: [May 26, 2014, 1:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wtf-is-the-deal-with-french-keyboqrds/689248/20 "2014-05-26T13:43:06Z")
> [@blindboyard](#):
>
> Use Dvorak.
Note that there is also a distinct French version of the Dvorak keyboard layout.
[Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wtf-is-the-deal-with-french-keyboqrds/689248.md?page=2)