There are a large number of
QWERTY
QWERTY ( ) is a keyboard layout for Latin-script alphabets. The name comes from the order of the first six Computer keyboard keys#Types, keys on the top letter row of the keyboard: . The QWERTY design is based on a layout included in the Sh ...
keyboard layouts used for languages written in the
Latin script
The Latin script, also known as the Roman script, is a writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae in Magna Graecia. The Gree ...
. Many of these keyboards include some additional symbols of other languages, but there also exist layouts that were designed with the goal to be usable for multiple languages (see
Multilingual variants). This list gives general descriptions of QWERTY keyboard variants along with details specific to certain operating systems, with emphasis on
Microsoft Windows
Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...
.
Specific language variants
English
Canada
English-speaking Canadians have traditionally used the same keyboard layout as in the United States, unless they are in a position where they have to write French on a regular basis. French-speaking Canadians respectively have favoured the Canadian French (CFR) and the Canadian French ACNOR (CFA) keyboard layouts (see
below
Below may refer to:
*Earth
*Ground (disambiguation)
*Soil
*Floor
* Bottom (disambiguation)
*Less than
*Temperatures below freezing
*Hell or underworld
People with the surname
* Ernst von Below (1863–1955), German World War I general
* Fred Belo ...
).
United Kingdom

The
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Northwestern Europe, off the coast of European mainland, the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...
and
Ireland
Ireland (, ; ; Ulster Scots dialect, Ulster-Scots: ) is an island in the North Atlantic Ocean, in Northwestern Europe. Geopolitically, the island is divided between the Republic of Ireland (officially Names of the Irish state, named Irelan ...
[All common operating systems offering a different layout for Ireland actually offer a clone of the UK layout labelled "Irish" (or "Ireland"). However, there is a separate Irish Gaelic layout (called "Gaelic" or similar denominations) that, though rarely used, it also supports ]Scottish Gaelic
Scottish Gaelic (, ; Endonym and exonym, endonym: ), also known as Scots Gaelic or simply Gaelic, is a Celtic language native to the Gaels of Scotland. As a member of the Goidelic language, Goidelic branch of Celtic, Scottish Gaelic, alongs ...
. The other Insular Celtic languages
Insular Celtic languages are the group of Celtic languages spoken in Brittany, Great Britain, Ireland, and the Isle of Man. All surviving Celtic languages are in the Insular group, including Breton, which is spoken on continental Europe in Br ...
have their own layout. use a keyboard layout based on the 48-key version defined in the (now withdrawn)
British Standard
British Standards (BS) are the standards produced by the BSI Group which is incorporated under a royal charter and which is formally designated as the national standards body (NSB) for the UK. The BSI Group produces British Standards under th ...
BS 4822. It is very similar to that of the United States, but has an AltGr key and a larger Enter key, includes £ and € signs and some rarely used
EBCDIC
Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC; ) is an eight- bit character encoding used mainly on IBM mainframe and IBM midrange computer operating systems. It descended from the code used with punched cards and the corresponding si ...
symbols (¬, ¦), and uses different positions for the characters @, ", #, ~, \, and , .
The BS 4822:1994 standard did not make any use of the AltGr key and lacked support for any non-ASCII characters other than ¬ and £. It also assigned a key for the non-ASCII character broken bar (¦), but lacks one for the far more commonly used ASCII character vertical bar (, ). It also lacked support for various diacritics used in the
Welsh alphabet, and the
Scottish Gaelic alphabet
Scottish Gaelic orthography has evolved over many centuries and is heavily etymology, etymologizing in its modern form. This means the orthography tends to preserve historical components rather than operating on the principles of a phonemic orthogr ...
; and also is missing the letter
yogh
The letter yogh (ȝogh) ( ; Scots: ; Middle English: ) is a Latin script letter that was used in Middle English and Older Scots, representing ''y'' () and various velar phonemes. It was derived from the Insular form of the letter ''g'', Ᵹ ...
, ȝ, used very rarely in the
Scots language. Therefore, various manufacturers have modified or extended the BS 4822 standard:
* The B00 key (left of Z), shifted, results in vertical bar (, ) on some systems (e.g. Windows UK/Ireland keyboard layout and
Linux
Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...
/
X11
The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems.
X originated as part of Project Athena at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984. The X protocol has been at ...
UK/Ireland keyboard layout), rather than the broken bar (¦) assigned by BS 4822 and provided in some systems (e.g.
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...
OS/2
OS/2 is a Proprietary software, proprietary computer operating system for x86 and PowerPC based personal computers. It was created and initially developed jointly by IBM and Microsoft, under the leadership of IBM software designer Ed Iacobucci, ...
UK166 keyboard layout)
* The E00 key (left of 1) with AltGr provides either vertical bar (, ) (
OS/2
OS/2 is a Proprietary software, proprietary computer operating system for x86 and PowerPC based personal computers. It was created and initially developed jointly by IBM and Microsoft, under the leadership of IBM software designer Ed Iacobucci, ...
's UK166 keyboard layout,
Linux
Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...
/
X11
The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems.
X originated as part of Project Athena at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984. The X protocol has been at ...
UK keyboard layout) or broken bar (¦) (Windows UK/Ireland keyboard layout)
Support for the diacritics needed for Scots Gaelic and Welsh was added to Windows and ChromeOS using a "UK-extended" setting (see
below
Below may refer to:
*Earth
*Ground (disambiguation)
*Soil
*Floor
* Bottom (disambiguation)
*Less than
*Temperatures below freezing
*Hell or underworld
People with the surname
* Ernst von Below (1863–1955), German World War I general
* Fred Belo ...
); Linux and X-Windows systems have an explicit or redesignated
compose key
A compose key (sometimes called multi key) is a key on a computer keyboard that indicates that the following (usually 2 or more) keystrokes trigger the insertion of an alternate character, typically a precomposed character or a symbol.
For insta ...
for this purpose.
= UK Apple keyboard
=
The British version of the
Apple Keyboard
Apple Inc.
Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, in Silicon Valley. It is best known for its consumer electronics, software, and services. Founded in 1976 ...
does not use the standard UK layout. Instead, some older versions have the US layout (see below) with a few differences: the sign is reached by and the sign by , the opposite to the US layout. The is also present and is typed with . Umlauts are reached by typing and then the vowel, and ß is reached by typing .
Newer Apple "British" keyboards use a layout that is relatively unlike either the US or traditional UK keyboard. It uses an elongated return key, a shortened left with and in the newly created position, and in the upper left of the keyboard are and instead of the traditional EBCDIC codes. The middle-row key that fits inside the key has and .
United States

The arrangement of the character input keys and the
Shift key
The Shift key is a modifier key on a alphanumeric keyboard, keyboard, used to type majuscule, capital letters and other alternate "upper" characters. There are typically two Shift keys, on the left and right sides of the row below the home row. T ...
s contained in this layout is specified in the
US national standard
ANSI
The American National Standards Institute (ANSI ) is a private nonprofit organization that oversees the development of voluntary consensus standards for products, services, processes, systems, and personnel in the United States. The organiz ...
-
INCITS
The InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS), (pronounced "insights"), is an ANSI-accredited standards development organization composed of Information technology developers. It was formerly known as the X3 and NCITS ...
154-1988 (R1999) (formerly ANSI X3.154-1988 (R1999)), where this layout is called "
ASCII
ASCII ( ), an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for representing a particular set of 95 (English language focused) printable character, printable and 33 control character, control c ...
keyboard". The complete US keyboard layout, as it is usually found, also contains the usual function keys in accordance with the international standard
ISO/IEC 9995-2, although this is not explicitly required by the US American national standard.
US keyboards are used not only in the United States, but also in many other English-speaking jurisdictions (except the UK and Ireland) such as
Canada
Canada is a country in North America. Its Provinces and territories of Canada, ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, making it the world's List of coun ...
,
Australia
Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country comprising mainland Australia, the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and list of islands of Australia, numerous smaller isl ...
, the
Caribbean
The Caribbean ( , ; ; ; ) is a region in the middle of the Americas centered around the Caribbean Sea in the Atlantic Ocean, North Atlantic Ocean, mostly overlapping with the West Indies. Bordered by North America to the north, Central America ...
nations,
Hong Kong
Hong Kong)., Legally Hong Kong, China in international treaties and organizations. is a special administrative region of China. With 7.5 million residents in a territory, Hong Kong is the fourth most densely populated region in the wor ...
,
Malaysia
Malaysia is a country in Southeast Asia. Featuring the Tanjung Piai, southernmost point of continental Eurasia, it is a federation, federal constitutional monarchy consisting of States and federal territories of Malaysia, 13 states and thre ...
,
India
India, officially the Republic of India, is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-largest country by area; the List of countries by population (United Nations), most populous country since ...
,
Pakistan
Pakistan, officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by population, fifth-most populous country, with a population of over 241.5 million, having the Islam by country# ...
,
Bangladesh
Bangladesh, officially the People's Republic of Bangladesh, is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by population, eighth-most populous country in the world and among the List of countries and dependencies by ...
,
Singapore
Singapore, officially the Republic of Singapore, is an island country and city-state in Southeast Asia. The country's territory comprises one main island, 63 satellite islands and islets, and one outlying islet. It is about one degree ...
,
New Zealand
New Zealand () is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and List of islands of New Zealand, over 600 smaller islands. It is the List of isla ...
, and
South Africa
South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the Southern Africa, southernmost country in Africa. Its Provinces of South Africa, nine provinces are bounded to the south by of coastline that stretches along the Atlantic O ...
. Local spelling in these regions sometimes conforms more closely to
British English
British English is the set of Variety (linguistics), varieties of the English language native to the United Kingdom, especially Great Britain. More narrowly, it can refer specifically to the English language in England, or, more broadly, to ...
usage, creating the undesirable side effect of also setting the language to US English rather than the local
orthography
An orthography is a set of convention (norm), conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, punctuation, Word#Word boundaries, word boundaries, capitalization, hyphenation, and Emphasis (typography), emphasis.
Most national ...
. This conflict would be fixed in
Windows 8
Windows 8 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was Software release life cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), released to manufacturing on August 1, 2012, made available for download via Microsoft ...
and later versions when Microsoft separated the keyboard and language settings. US keyboards also see use in Indonesia and the Philippines, the former of which
uses the same 26-letter alphabet as English.
The US keyboard layout has a second
Alt key
The Alt key (pronounced or ) on a computer keyboard is used to change (alternate) the function of other pressed keys. Thus, the Alt key is a modifier key, used in a similar fashion to the Shift key. For example, simply pressing ''A'' will ty ...
instead of the
AltGr key and does not use any
dead key
A dead key is a special kind of modifier key on a mechanical typewriter, or computer keyboard, that is typically used to attach a specific diacritic to a base letter (alphabet), letter. The dead key does not generate a (complete) grapheme, charact ...
s; this makes it inefficient for all but a handful of languages. On the other hand, the US keyboard layout (or the similar UK layout) is occasionally used by
programmers in countries where the keys for [] are located in less convenient positions on the locally customary layout.
On some keyboards the enter key is bigger than traditionally and takes up also a part of the line above, more or less the area of the traditional location of the
backslash
The backslash is a mark used mainly in computing and mathematics. It is the mirror image of the common slash (punctuation), slash . It is a relatively recent mark, first documented in the 1930s. It is sometimes called a hack, whack, Escape c ...
key (\). In these cases the backslash is located in alternative places. It can be situated one line above the default location, on the right of the
equals sign
The equals sign (British English) or equal sign (American English), also known as the equality sign, is the mathematical symbol , which is used to indicate equality. In an equation it is placed between two expressions that have the same valu ...
key (=). Sometimes it is placed one line below its traditional situation, on the right of the
apostrophe
The apostrophe (, ) is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritical mark, in languages that use the Latin alphabet and some other alphabets. In English, the apostrophe is used for two basic purposes:
* The marking of the omission of one o ...
key (') (in these cases the enter key is narrower than usual on the line of its default location). It may also be two lines below its default situation on the right of a narrower than traditionally right
shift key
The Shift key is a modifier key on a alphanumeric keyboard, keyboard, used to type majuscule, capital letters and other alternate "upper" characters. There are typically two Shift keys, on the left and right sides of the row below the home row. T ...
. A variant of this layout is used in Arabic-speaking countries.
This variant has the , \ key to the left of Z, ~ ` key where the , \ key is in the usual layout, and the > < key where the ~ ` key is in the usual layout.
Czech

The typewriter came to the
Czech
Czech may refer to:
* Anything from or related to the Czech Republic, a country in Europe
** Czech language
** Czechs, the people of the area
** Czech culture
** Czech cuisine
* One of three mythical brothers, Lech, Czech, and Rus
*Czech (surnam ...
-speaking area in the late 19th century, when it was part of
Austria-Hungary
Austria-Hungary, also referred to as the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Dual Monarchy or the Habsburg Monarchy, was a multi-national constitutional monarchy in Central Europe#Before World War I, Central Europe between 1867 and 1918. A military ...
where German was the dominant language of administration. Therefore, Czech typewriters have the
QWERTZ layout.
However, with the introduction of imported computers, especially since the 1990s, the QWERTY keyboard layout is frequently used for computer keyboards. The Czech QWERTY layout differs from QWERTZ in that the characters (e.g. @$& and others) missing from the Czech keyboard are accessible with AltGr on the same keys where they are located on an
American keyboard. In Czech QWERTZ keyboards the positions of these characters accessed through AltGr differs.
Danish

Both the Danish and
Norwegian keyboards include dedicated keys for the letters
Å/å,
Æ/æ and
Ø/ø, but the placement is a little different, as the and keys are swapped on the Norwegian layout. (The
Finnish–Swedish keyboard is also largely similar to the Norwegian layout, but the and are replaced with and . On some systems, the Danish keyboard may allow typing Ö/ö and Ä/ä by holding the or key while striking and , respectively.) Computers with Windows are commonly sold with ÖØÆ and ÄÆØ printed on the two keys, allowing same computer hardware to be sold in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, with different operating system settings.
Dutch (Netherlands)

Though it is seldom used (most Dutch keyboards use
US International
QWERTY ( ) is a keyboard layout for Latin-script alphabets. The name comes from the order of the first six Computer keyboard keys#Types, keys on the top letter row of the keyboard: . The QWERTY design is based on a layout included in the Sh ...
layout), the Dutch layout uses QWERTY and adds the € sign, the
diaeresis (), the German (), the
pilcrow
In typography, the pilcrow (¶) is a glyph used to identify a paragraph. In editorial production the ''pilcrow'' typographic character is also known as the paragraph mark, the paragraph sign, the paragraph symbol, the paraph, and the blind ...
(), the (US)
cent sign (), the Greek letter μ (for the
micro-
''Micro'' (Greek letter μ, Mu (letter), mu, non-Italic type, italic) is a metric prefix, unit prefix in the metric system denoting a factor of one millionth (10−6). It comes from the Ancient Greek, Greek word (), meaning "small".
It is the ...
sign), the
braces ( and the
guillemet quotation marks (), as well as having different locations for some other symbols. An older version contained a single-stroke key for the Dutch digraph
ij, which is usually typed by the combination of and . In the 1990s, there was a version with the now-obsolete
florin sign () for PCs.
See also below.
Estonian

The keyboard layout used in
Estonia
Estonia, officially the Republic of Estonia, is a country in Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by the Gulf of Finland across from Finland, to the west by the Baltic Sea across from Sweden, to the south by Latvia, and to the east by Ru ...
is virtually the same as the
Swedish layout. The main difference is that the and keys (to the right of ) are replaced with and respectively (the latter letter being the most distinguishing feature of the
Estonian alphabet). Some special symbols and
dead keys
A dead key is a special kind of modifier key on a mechanical typewriter, or computer keyboard, that is typically used to attach a specific diacritic to a base letter. The dead key does not generate a (complete) character by itself, but modifies ...
are also moved around.
Faroese

The same as the Danish layout with added (
Eth
Eth ( , uppercase: ⟨Ð⟩, lowercase: ⟨ð⟩; also spelled edh or eð), known as in Old English, is a letter used in Old English, Middle English, Icelandic, Faroese (in which it is called ), and Elfdalian.
It was also used in Sca ...
), since the
Faroe Islands
The Faroe Islands ( ) (alt. the Faroes) are an archipelago in the North Atlantic Ocean and an autonomous territory of the Danish Realm, Kingdom of Denmark. Located between Iceland, Norway, and the United Kingdom, the islands have a populat ...
are a self-governed part of the
Kingdom of Denmark
The Danish Realm, officially the Kingdom of Denmark, or simply Denmark, is a sovereign state consisting of a collection of constituent territories united by the Constitution of Denmark, Constitutional Act, which applies to the entire territor ...
.
French (Canada)

The Canadian French (CFR) keyboard layout is commonly used in Canada by
French-speaking Canadians. It is the most common layout for
laptop
A laptop computer or notebook computer, also known as a laptop or notebook, is a small, portable personal computer (PC). Laptops typically have a Clamshell design, clamshell form factor (design), form factor with a flat-panel computer scree ...
s and stand-alone keyboards aimed at the
Francophone
The Francophonie or Francophone world is the whole body of people and organisations around the world who use the French language regularly for private or public purposes. The term was coined by Onésime Reclus in 1880 and became important a ...
market. Unlike the AZERTY layout used in France and Belgium, it is a QWERTY layout and as such is also relatively commonly used by English speakers in the US and Canada (accustomed to using US standard QWERTY keyboards) for easy access to the accented letters found in some French
loanword
A loanword (also a loan word, loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language (the recipient or target language), through the process of borrowing. Borrowing is a metaphorical term t ...
s. It can be used to type all accented French characters, as well as some from other languages, and serves all English functions as well. It is popular mainly because of its close similarity to the basic US keyboard commonly used by English-speaking Canadians and Americans, historical use of US-made typewriters by French-Canadians. The right Alt key is reconfigured as an
AltGr key that gives easy access to a further range of characters (marked in blue and red on the keyboard image. Blue indicates an alternative character that will display as typed. Red indicates a
dead key
A dead key is a special kind of modifier key on a mechanical typewriter, or computer keyboard, that is typically used to attach a specific diacritic to a base letter (alphabet), letter. The dead key does not generate a (complete) grapheme, charact ...
: the diacritic will be applied to the next vowel typed.) The traditional Canadian French keyboard from IBM must use an ISO keyboard. The French guillemets located on the extra key are needed to type proper French, they are not optional. A dvorak version (traditional Canadian French layout) is also supported by Microsoft Windows.
In this keyboard, the key names are translated to French:
* is or (short for ''Fixer''/''Verrouiller Majuscule'', meaning ''Lock Uppercase'').
* is .
* is .

The "hybrid" keyboard layout, often referred incorrectly as "canadian multilingual" or "bilingual" is a mix between the US English and the Canadian French layout over an ISO keyboard. This layout has been developed by manufacturers as a cost saving strategy first for their low end laptops. They tend to be extended to the mid-range laptops in the recent years and sold wrongly as a "French" keyboard. Today, this layout seems to be criticized by both anglophones and francophones. The anglophones accustomed to the ANSI keyboard complain about the small ISO shift on left and francophones can find these legends hard to read and messy. In this keyboard, the key names are translated in both French and English. This keyboard can be netherless useful for programming.
In 1988, the Quebec government has developed a new keyboard layout, using proper keys for ,,,,, standardized by the CSA Group and adopted also by the federal government. This layout is known as Canadian French (Legacy) today on Windows and is considered to be the ancestor to the actual Canadian Multilingual Standard. The CMS on Windows and Linux is based on the CAN/CSA Z243.200-92 standard (launched in 1992 by the CSA Group, revised in 2021). Apple use a layout based mostly on the standardized CSA keyboard from 1992 too, called Canadian French ― CSA. The CMS is one of the few layouts allowing to type the ligature
œ/Œ, common in French. The integral version use pictograms based on the
ISO 9995-7 standard. Unlike the traditional Canadian French keyboard developed by IBM, the CSA Keyboard is also standardized on both ISO and ANSI keyboard. The French guillemets on the CSA keyboard are located on the level 3 with the and keys. The Ù on the extra key can be replaced by a combinaison of + (dead key left from ) then or +. The ISO version still netherless needed by the Quebec government, following their higher standard named SGQRI-001. The Quebec CSA keyboard is also named Canadian French ACNOR (CFA) or Canadian International Bilingual.
Greek

* The stress accents, indicated in red, are produced by pressing that key (or shifted key) followed by an appropriate vowel.
* Use of the "AltGr" key may produce the characters shown in blue.
German
Germany, Austria, Switzerland, The Czech Republic, Liechtenstein, and Luxembourg use
QWERTZ
The QWERTZ ( ) QWERTZU ( ), or QWERTZUIOP keyboard is a typewriter and keyboard layout widely used in Central and Southeast Europe. The name comes from the first six letters at the top left of the keyboard: ( ).
Overview
The main differ ...
layouts, where the letter Z is to the right of T.
Icelandic

The Icelandic keyboard layout is different from the standard QWERTY keyboard because the Icelandic alphabet has some special letters, most of which it shares with the other Nordic countries:
Þ/þ, Ð/ð, Æ/æ, and Ö/ö. (Æ/æ also occurs in Norwegian, Danish and Faroese, Ð/ð in Faroese, and Ö/ö in Swedish, Finnish and Estonian. In Norwegian Ö/ö could be substituted for Ø/Ø which is the same sound/letter and is widely understood).
The letters Á/á, Ý/ý, Ú/ú, Í/í, Ó/ó and É/é are produced by first pressing the
dead key
A dead key is a special kind of modifier key on a mechanical typewriter, or computer keyboard, that is typically used to attach a specific diacritic to a base letter (alphabet), letter. The dead key does not generate a (complete) grapheme, charact ...
and then the corresponding letter. The Nordic letters Å/å and Ä/ä can be produced by first pressing , located below the key, and (for ¨) which also works for the non-Nordic ÿ, Ü/ü, Ï/ï, and Ë/ë. These letters are not used natively in Icelandic, but may have been implemented for ease of communication in other Nordic languages. Additional diacritics may be found behind the key: for ˋ (grave accent) and for ˆ (circumflex).
Irish

Windows includes an Irish layout which supports acute accents with for the
Irish language
Irish (Standard Irish: ), also known as Irish Gaelic or simply Gaelic ( ), is a Celtic language of the Indo-European language family. It is a member of the Goidelic languages of the Insular Celtic sub branch of the family and is indigenous ...
and grave accents with the
dead key
A dead key is a special kind of modifier key on a mechanical typewriter, or computer keyboard, that is typically used to attach a specific diacritic to a base letter (alphabet), letter. The dead key does not generate a (complete) grapheme, charact ...
for
Scottish Gaelic
Scottish Gaelic (, ; Endonym and exonym, endonym: ), also known as Scots Gaelic or simply Gaelic, is a Celtic language native to the Gaels of Scotland. As a member of the Goidelic language, Goidelic branch of Celtic, Scottish Gaelic, alongs ...
. The other
Insular Celtic languages
Insular Celtic languages are the group of Celtic languages spoken in Brittany, Great Britain, Ireland, and the Isle of Man. All surviving Celtic languages are in the Insular group, including Breton, which is spoken on continental Europe in Br ...
have their own layout. The UK or UK-Extended layout is also frequently used.
Italian

* Braces (right above square brackets and shown in purple) are given with both AltGr and Shift pressed.
* The tilde (~) and backquote (`) characters are not present on the Italian keyboard layout (with Linux, they are available by pressing +, and +; Windows might not recognise these keybindings).
* When using Microsoft Windows, the standard Italian keyboard layout does not allow one to write 100% correct Italian language, since it lacks capital accented vowels, and in particular the
È key. The common workaround is writing E' (E followed by an
apostrophe
The apostrophe (, ) is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritical mark, in languages that use the Latin alphabet and some other alphabets. In English, the apostrophe is used for two basic purposes:
* The marking of the omission of one o ...
) instead, or relying on the auto-correction feature of several
word processor A word processor (WP) is a device or computer program that provides for input, editing, formatting, and output of text, often with some additional features.
Early word processors were stand-alone devices dedicated to the function, but current word ...
s when available. It is possible to obtain the È symbol in MS Windows by typing + . Mac users, however, can write the correct accented character by pressing + + or, in the usual Mac way, by pressing the correct key for the accent (in this case + ) and subsequently pressing the wanted letter (in this case + ). Linux users can also write it by pressing the key with enabled.
There is an alternate layout, which differs only in disposition of characters accessible through , and includes the tilde and the curly brackets. It is commonly used in IBM keyboards.
Italian
typewriter
A typewriter is a Machine, mechanical or electromechanical machine for typing characters. Typically, a typewriter has an array of Button (control), keys, and each one causes a different single character to be produced on paper by striking an i ...
s often have the
QZERTY
A keyboard layout is any specific physical, visual, or functional arrangement of the keys, legends, or key-meaning associations (respectively) of a computer keyboard, mobile phone, or other computer-controlled typographic keyboard. Standard keybo ...
layout instead.
The Italian-speaking part of
Switzerland
Switzerland, officially the Swiss Confederation, is a landlocked country located in west-central Europe. It is bordered by Italy to the south, France to the west, Germany to the north, and Austria and Liechtenstein to the east. Switzerland ...
uses the QWERTZ keyboard.
Latvian
Although rarely used, a keyboard layout specifically designed for the Latvian language called ŪGJRMV exists. The Latvian QWERTY keyboard layout is most commonly used; its layout is the same as the United States one, but with a dead key, which allows entering special characters (āčēģīķļņōŗšūž). The most common dead key is the apostrophe ('), which is followed by Alt+Gr (Windows default for Latvian layout). Some prefer using the tick (`).
Lithuanian
Where in standard QWERTY the number row is located, you find in Lithuanian QWERTY: Ą, Č, Ę, Ė, Į, Š, Ų, Ū, Ž, instead of their counterparts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, =. If you still want to use the numbers of the mentioned 'number row', you can create them in combination with the -key. Aside from these changes the keyboard is standard QWERTY. Besides QWERTY, the
ĄŽERTY layout without the adjustment of the number row is used.
Maltese
The
Maltese language
Maltese (, also or ) is a Semitic languages, Semitic language derived from Siculo-Arabic, late medieval Sicilian Arabic with Romance languages, Romance Stratum (linguistics), superstrata. It is the only Semitic languages, Semitic language pred ...
uses Unicode (UTF-8) to display the Maltese diacritics: ċ Ċ; ġ Ġ; ħ Ħ; ż Ż (together with à À; è È; ì Ì; ò Ò; ù Ù). There ar
two standard keyboard layouts for Maltese according to "MSA 100:2002 Maltese Keyboard Standard"; one of 47 keys and one of 48 keys. The 48-key layout is the most popular.
Norwegian

The
Norwegian languages use the same letters as
Danish, but the Norwegian keyboard differs from the Danish layout regarding the placement of the , and (
backslash
The backslash is a mark used mainly in computing and mathematics. It is the mirror image of the common slash (punctuation), slash . It is a relatively recent mark, first documented in the 1930s. It is sometimes called a hack, whack, Escape c ...
) keys. On the
Danish keyboard, the and are swapped. The
Swedish keyboard is also similar to the Norwegian layout, but and are replaced with and . On some systems, the Norwegian keyboard may allow typing Ö/ö and Ä/ä by holding the or key while striking and , respectively.
There is also an alternative keyboard layout called ''Norwegian with Sámi'', which allows for easier input of the characters required to write various
Sámi languages
The Sámi languages ( ), also rendered in English language, English as Sami and Saami, are a group of Uralic languages spoken by the Indigenous Sámi peoples in Northern Europe (in parts of northern Finland, Norway, Sweden, and extreme northwest ...
. All the Sámi characters are accessed through the key.
On
Macintosh
Mac is a brand of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 1984. The name is short for Macintosh (its official name until 1999), a reference to the McIntosh (apple), McIntosh apple. The current product lineup inclu ...
computers, the ''Norwegian'' and ''Norwegian extended'' keyboard layouts have a slightly different placement for some of the symbols obtained with the help of the or keys. Notably, the ''$'' sign is accessed with and ''¢'' with . Furthermore, the frequently used ''@'' is placed between and .
Polish

Most typewriters use a QWERTZ keyboard with
Polish letters (with diacritical marks) accessed directly (officially approved as "Typist's keyboard", , Polish Standard PN-87), which is mainly ignored in Poland as impractical (custom-made keyboards, e.g., those in the public sector as well as some Apple computers, present an exception to this paradigm); the "Polish programmer's" () layout has become the ''de facto'' standard, used on virtually all computers sold on the Polish market.
Most computer keyboards in Poland are laid out according to the
standard US visual and functional layout. Polish diacritics are accessed by using the ''
AltGr'' key with a corresponding similar letter from the base Latin alphabet. Normal capitalization rules apply with respect to ''
Shift'' and ''
Caps Lock'' keys. For example, to enter "Ź", one can type ''Shift+AltGr+X'' with ''Caps Lock'' off, or turn on ''Caps Lock'' and type ''AltGr+X''.
Both ANSI and ISO mechanical layouts are common sights, and even some non-standard mechanical layouts are in use. ANSI is often preferred, as the additional key provides no additional function, at least in
Microsoft Windows
Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...
where it duplicates the backslash key, while taking space from the Shift key. Many keyboards do not label ''AltGr'' as such, leaving the ''Alt'' marking as in the US layout – the right ''Alt'' key nevertheless functions as ''AltGr'' in this layout, causing possible confusion when
keyboard shortcuts
In computing, a keyboard shortcut (also hotkey/hot key or key binding) is a software-based assignment of an action to one or more keys on a computer keyboard. Most Operating system, operating systems and Application software, applications come ...
with the ''Alt'' key are required (these usually work only with the left ''Alt'') and causing the key to be commonly referred to as ''right Alt'' (). However, keyboards with ''AltGr'' marking are available and it is also officially used by Microsoft when depicting the layout.
Also, on
MS Windows
Windows is a product line of proprietary graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sectors of the computing industry – Windows (unqualified) for a ...
, the tilde character "~" (''Shift''+''`'') acts as a
dead key
A dead key is a special kind of modifier key on a mechanical typewriter, or computer keyboard, that is typically used to attach a specific diacritic to a base letter (alphabet), letter. The dead key does not generate a (complete) grapheme, charact ...
to type Polish letters (with diacritical marks) thus, to obtain an "Ł", one may press ''Shift''+''`'' followed by ''L''. The tilde character is obtained with (''Shift''+''`'') then ''space''.
In
Linux
Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...
-based systems, the euro symbol is typically mapped to Alt+5 instead of Alt+U, the tilde acts as a normal key, and several accented letters from other European languages are accessible through combinations with left Alt. Polish letters are also accessible by using the
compose key
A compose key (sometimes called multi key) is a key on a computer keyboard that indicates that the following (usually 2 or more) keystrokes trigger the insertion of an alternate character, typically a precomposed character or a symbol.
For insta ...
.
Software keyboards on touchscreen devices usually make the Polish diacritics available as one of the alternatives which show up after long-pressing the corresponding Latin letter. However, modern
predictive text and
autocorrection
Autocorrection, also known as text replacement, replace-as-you-type, text expander or simply autocorrect, is an automatic data validation function commonly found in word processors and text editing interfaces for smartphones and tablet computer ...
algorithms largely mitigate the need to type them directly on such devices.
There is also another expanded Polish keyboard layout since 2021, based on Polish Standard and the layout from Polish 80s computers Mazovia, wide expanded into all Latin diacritical signs, Greek signs, mathematical signs, IPA signs, typographical signs, symbols and sign "zł" meaning
Polish currency, available in two versions, QWERTY and QWERTZ.
Portuguese
Brazil

The Brazilian computer keyboard layout is specified in the
ABNT
The Brazilian Technical Standards Association (, ABNT) is a private non-profit organization and the normative body which is responsible for technical standards in Brazil, and intends to promote technological development in the country. Brazilian ...
NBR 10346 variant 2 (alphanumeric portion) and 10347 (numeric portion) standards.
[ABNT (1991):]
NBR 10346 de 08/1991 – Tecnologia de informação – Teclados em equipamentos de processamento de dados – Conjunto alfanumérico -Padronização
. Available from the ABNT website. Accessed on 2021-08-15.
Essentially, the Brazilian keyboard contains dead keys for five variants of diacritics in use in the language; the letter Ç, the only application of the
cedilha in Portuguese, has its own key. In some keyboard layouts the + combination produces the ₢ character (
Unicode
Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...
0x20A2), symbol for the old currency
cruzeiro, a symbol that is not used in practice (the common abbreviation in the eighties and nineties used to be Cr$). The
cent sign ¢, is accessible via +, but is not commonly used for the
centavo
The centavo (Spanish language, Spanish and Portuguese language, Portuguese 'one hundredth') is a fractional monetary unit that represents one hundredth of a basic monetary unit in many countries around the world. The term comes from Latin ''centu ...
, subunit of previous currencies as well as the current
real, which itself is represented by R$. The Euro sign € is not standardized in this layout. The masculine and feminine
ordinals ª and º are accessible via combinations. The
section sign
The section sign (§) is a typographical character for referencing individually numbered sections of a document; it is frequently used when citing sections of a legal code. It is also known as the section symbol, section mark, double-s, or si ...
§ (Unicode U+00A7), in Portuguese called ''parágrafo'', is nowadays practically only used to denote sections of laws.
Variant 2 of the Brazilian keyboard, the only which gained general acceptance (MS Windows treats both variants as the same layout),
has a unique
mechanical layout, combining some features of the
ISO 9995-3 and the ''JIS'' keyboards in order to fit 12 keys between the left and right Shift (compared to the American standard of 10 and the international of 11). Its modern,
IBM PS/2
The Personal System/2 or PS/2 is IBM's second generation of personal computers. Released in 1987, it officially replaced the IBM Personal Computer, IBM PC, IBM Personal Computer XT, XT, IBM Personal Computer/AT, AT, and IBM PC Convertible, PC Co ...
-based variations, are thus known as 107-keys keyboards, and the original PS/2 variation was 104-key. Variant 1, never widely adopted, was based on the ISO 9995-2 keyboards. To make this layout usable with keyboards with only 11 keys in the last row, the rightmost key (/?°) has its functions replicated across the +, +, and + combinations.
Portugal

Essentially, the Portuguese keyboard contains dead keys for five variants of diacritics; the letter Ç, the only application of the
cedilha in Portuguese, has its own key, but there is also a dedicated key for the
ordinal indicator
In written languages, an ordinal indicator is a character, or group of characters, following a numeral denoting that it is an ordinal number, rather than a cardinal number. Historically these letters were "elevated terminals", that is to say ...
s and a dedicated key for
quotation mark
Quotation marks are punctuation marks used in pairs in various writing systems to identify direct speech, a quotation, or a phrase. The pair consists of an opening quotation mark and a closing quotation mark, which may or may not be the sam ...
s. The + combination for producing the
euro sign
The euro sign () is the currency sign used for the euro, the official currency of the eurozone. The design was presented to the public by the European Commission on 12 December 1996. It consists of a stylized letter E (or epsilon), crossed by ...
€ (
Unicode
Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...
0x20AC) has become standard. On some QWERTY keyboards the key labels are translated, but the majority are labelled in English.
During the 20th century, a different keyboard layout,
HCESAR, was in widespread use in
Portugal
Portugal, officially the Portuguese Republic, is a country on the Iberian Peninsula in Southwestern Europe. Featuring Cabo da Roca, the westernmost point in continental Europe, Portugal borders Spain to its north and east, with which it share ...
.
Romanian

The current Romanian National Standard SR 13392:2004 establishes two layouts for
Romanian keyboards: a "primary" one and a "secondary" one.
The "primary" layout is intended for traditional users who have learned how to type with older, Microsoft-style implementations of the Romanian keyboard. The "secondary" layout is mainly used by programmers as it does not contradict the physical arrangement of keys on a US-style keyboard. The "secondary" arrangement is used as the default Romanian layout by
Linux
Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...
distributions, as defined in the "X Keyboard Configuration Database".
There are four
Romanian-specific characters that are incorrectly implemented in versions of
Microsoft Windows
Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...
before
Vista
Vista may refer to:
Software
*Windows Vista, the line of Microsoft Windows client operating systems released in 2006 and 2007
* VistA, (Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture) a medical records system of the United States ...
:
*
Ș (U+0218, S with comma), incorrectly implemented as
Ş (U+015E, S with cedilla)
* ș (U+0219, s with comma), incorrectly implemented as ş (U+015F, s with cedilla)
*
Ț (U+021A, T with comma), incorrectly implemented as
Ţ (U+0162, T with cedilla)
* ț (U+021B, t with comma), incorrectly implemented as ţ (U+0163, t with cedilla)
The cedilla-versions of the characters do not exist in the Romanian language (they came to be used due to a historic bug). The UCS now says that encoding this was a mistake because it messed up Romanian data and the letters with cedilla and the letters with comma are the same letter with a different style.
Since Romanian hardware keyboards are not widely available, Cristian Secară has created a driver that allows Romanian characters to be generated with a US-style keyboard in all versions of Windows prior to Vista through the use of the AltGr key modifier.
Windows Vista and newer versions include the correct diacritical signs in the default Romanian Keyboard layout.
This layout has the Z and Y keys mapped like in English layouts and also includes characters like the 'at' (@) and dollar ($) signs, among others. The older cedilla-version layout is still included albeit as the 'Legacy' layout.
Slovak

In
Slovakia
Slovakia, officially the Slovak Republic, is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is bordered by Poland to the north, Ukraine to the east, Hungary to the south, Austria to the west, and the Czech Republic to the northwest. Slovakia's m ...
, similarly to the Czech Republic, both QWERTZ and QWERTY keyboard layouts are used.
QWERTZ
The QWERTZ ( ) QWERTZU ( ), or QWERTZUIOP keyboard is a typewriter and keyboard layout widely used in Central and Southeast Europe. The name comes from the first six letters at the top left of the keyboard: ( ).
Overview
The main differ ...
is the default keyboard layout for
Slovak in Microsoft Windows.
Spanish
Spain

The Spanish keyboard layout is used to write in
Spanish
Spanish might refer to:
* Items from or related to Spain:
**Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain
**Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many countries in the Americas
**Spanish cuisine
**Spanish history
**Spanish culture
...
and in other languages of Spain such as
Catalan,
Basque
Basque may refer to:
* Basques, an ethnic group of Spain and France
* Basque language, their language
Places
* Basque Country (greater region), the homeland of the Basque people with parts in both Spain and France
* Basque Country (autonomous co ...
,
Galician,
Aragonese,
Asturian and
Occitan Occitan may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to the Occitania territory in parts of France, Italy, Monaco and Spain.
* Something of, from, or related to the Occitania administrative region of France.
* Occitan language, spoken in parts o ...
. It includes
Ñ for Spanish, Asturian and Galician, the
acute accent
The acute accent (), ,
is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin alphabet, Latin, Cyrillic script, Cyrillic, and Greek alphabet, Greek scripts. For the most commonly encountered uses of the accen ...
, the
diaeresis, the
inverted question and exclamation marks (¿, ¡), the superscripted o and a (º, ª) for writing abbreviated
ordinal numbers
In set theory, an ordinal number, or ordinal, is a generalization of ordinal numerals (first, second, th, etc.) aimed to extend enumeration to infinite sets.
A finite set can be enumerated by successively labeling each element with the leas ...
in masculine and feminine in Spanish and Galician, and finally, some characters required only for typing Catalan and Occitan, namely
Ç, the
grave accent
The grave accent () ( or ) is a diacritical mark used to varying degrees in French, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan and many other Western European languages as well as for a few unusual uses in English. It is also used in other ...
and the
interpunct
An interpunct , also known as an interpoint, middle dot, middot, centered dot or centred dot, is a punctuation mark consisting of a vertically centered dot used for interword separation in Classical Latin. ( Word-separating spaces did not appe ...
(' / ', used in ''l·l''; located at Shift-3). It can also be used to write other international characters, such as those using a
circumflex accent
The circumflex () is a diacritic in the Latin and Greek scripts that is also used in the written forms of many languages and in various romanization and transcription schemes. It received its English name from "bent around"a translation of ...
(used in French and Portuguese among others), which are available as
dead keys
A dead key is a special kind of modifier key on a mechanical typewriter, or computer keyboard, that is typically used to attach a specific diacritic to a base letter. The dead key does not generate a (complete) character by itself, but modifies ...
. However, it lacks two characters used in Asturian:
Ḥ
Ḥ (Lower case, minuscule: ḥ) is a letter of the Latin alphabet, formed from H with the addition of a dot (diacritic), dot diacritic.
Usage
Ḥ is used to represent the voiceless pharyngeal fricative () in Heth#Arabic_.E1.B8.A5.C4.81.CA.BE, A ...
and
Ḷ
Ḷ (Lower case, minuscule: ḷ) is a letter of the Latin alphabet, derived from L with a diacritical dot below. It has been used in multiple languages to represent various sounds:
*In Asturian language, Asturian, a Digraph (orthography), digraph ...
(historically, general support for these two has been poor – they are not present in the
ISO 8859-1
ISO/IEC 8859-1:1998, ''Information technology— 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets—Part 1: Latin alphabet No. 1'', is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in 19 ...
character encoding standard, or any other
ISO/IEC 8859
ISO/IEC 8859 is a joint International Organization for Standardization, ISO and International Electrotechnical Commission, IEC series of standards for 8-bit character encodings. The series of standards consists of numbered parts, such as ISO/IEC ...
standard). Several alternative distributions, based on this one or created from scratch, have been created to address this issue (see the
Other original layouts and layout design software section for more information).
On most keyboards, € is marked as Alt Gr + E and not Alt Gr + 5 as shown in the image. However, in some keyboards, € is found marked twice.
Spanish keyboards are usually labelled in Spanish instead of English, its abbreviations being:
On some keyboards, the c-cedilla key (Ç) is located one or two lines above, rather than on the right of, the acute accent key (´). In some cases it is placed on the right of the plus sign key (+), while in other keyboards it is situated on the right of the inverted exclamation mark key (¡).
Latin America, officially known as Spanish Latinamerican sort

The Latin American
Spanish
Spanish might refer to:
* Items from or related to Spain:
**Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain
**Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many countries in the Americas
**Spanish cuisine
**Spanish history
**Spanish culture
...
keyboard layout is used throughout
Mexico
Mexico, officially the United Mexican States, is a country in North America. It is the northernmost country in Latin America, and borders the United States to the north, and Guatemala and Belize to the southeast; while having maritime boundar ...
,
Central and
South America
South America is a continent entirely in the Western Hemisphere and mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a considerably smaller portion in the Northern Hemisphere. It can also be described as the southern Subregion#Americas, subregion o ...
. Before its design, Latin American vendors had been selling the Spanish (Spain) layout as default; this is still being the case, with both keyboard layouts being sold simultaneously all over the region.
Its most obvious difference from the Spanish (Spain) layout is the lack of a
Ç key. While it has the
tilde
The tilde (, also ) is a grapheme or with a number of uses. The name of the character came into English from Spanish , which in turn came from the Latin , meaning 'title' or 'superscription'. Its primary use is as a diacritic (accent) in ...
(~), it is not a dead key on Windows (available on Linux as an option to be enabled). It also has the circunflex (^) and the grave accent (`) available as tertiary position characters on and while in the Spanish Spain layout the grave has its own key and the diaeresis can be typed using as a secondary position character. This is not a problem when writing in Spanish but it generates issues when trying to type in other languages such as French or Portuguese, due to the inhability to produce the Ç or the unfavourable position of the other dead keys. This is specially true either for countries with large commercial ties to
Brazil
Brazil, officially the Federative Republic of Brazil, is the largest country in South America. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by area, fifth-largest country by area and the List of countries and dependencies by population ...
(
Argentina
Argentina, officially the Argentine Republic, is a country in the southern half of South America. It covers an area of , making it the List of South American countries by area, second-largest country in South America after Brazil, the fourt ...
,
Paraguay
Paraguay, officially the Republic of Paraguay, is a landlocked country in South America. It is bordered by Argentina to the Argentina–Paraguay border, south and southwest, Brazil to the Brazil–Paraguay border, east and northeast, and Boli ...
and
Uruguay
Uruguay, officially the Oriental Republic of Uruguay, is a country in South America. It shares borders with Argentina to its west and southwest and Brazil to its north and northeast, while bordering the Río de la Plata to the south and the A ...
) or for language learners and translators. Apart from that, the € sign is nonexistent on this layout. It has to be typed from the numeric pad using an altcode or copied and pasted from other websites.
The Latin American layout, although similar to the Spanish Spain layout, has some peculiarities: the is placed next to the , while in the Spanish Spain layout it is located next to the . Meanwhile, the @ sign (done by pressing in the Spain layout) is instead produced by pressing . These two features generate a lot of confusion on many users as many machines use a different keyboard layout that the one set as default on the system: one may encounter a computer with the Spanish Spain layout set up as default but also having the Latin American keyboard physically, or the other way around. Thus, it is very common for people to hit the wrong dead key or be unable to produce a character as shown on the layout because these two keyboards are available side by side to the public, so users generally struggle from the transition of i.e. using the Latin American distribution at home while employing the Spanish Spain layout at work or school or viceversa.
In this layout, key names are translated: "Caps Lock" is rendered as "Bloq Mayús", "Enter" appears as either "Intro" or "Entrar" depending on the vendor, "Page up" and "page down" appear as "re pág" and "av pag", respectively; "shift" is translated as "mayús", and "backspace" is "retroceso".
Swedish

The central characteristics of the
Swedish keyboard are the three additional letters
Å/å,
Ä/ä, and
Ö/ö. The same visual layout is also in use in
Finland
Finland, officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country in Northern Europe. It borders Sweden to the northwest, Norway to the north, and Russia to the east, with the Gulf of Bothnia to the west and the Gulf of Finland to the south, ...
and
Estonia
Estonia, officially the Republic of Estonia, is a country in Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by the Gulf of Finland across from Finland, to the west by the Baltic Sea across from Sweden, to the south by Latvia, and to the east by Ru ...
, as the letters Ä/ä and Ö/ö are shared with the
Swedish language
Swedish ( ) is a North Germanic languages, North Germanic language from the Indo-European languages, Indo-European language family, spoken predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland. It has at least 10 million native speakers, making it the G ...
, and even Å/å is needed by
Swedish-speaking Finns
The Swedish-speaking population of Finland (whose members are called by many names—see below; ; ) is a linguistic minority in Finland. They maintain a strong identity and are seen either as a separate cultural, ethnic or linguistic group or ...
. However, the
Finnish multilingual keyboard adds new letters and punctuation to the functional layout.
The
Norwegian keyboard largely resembles the Swedish layout, but the and are replaced with and . The
Danish keyboard is also similar, but it has the and swapped. On some systems, the Swedish or Finnish keyboard may allow typing Ø/ø and Æ/æ by holding the or key while striking and , respectively.
The ''Swedish with Sámi'' keyboard allows typing not only and , but even the letters required to write various
Sámi languages
The Sámi languages ( ), also rendered in English language, English as Sami and Saami, are a group of Uralic languages spoken by the Indigenous Sámi peoples in Northern Europe (in parts of northern Finland, Norway, Sweden, and extreme northwest ...
. This keyboard has the same function for all the keys engraved on the regular Swedish keyboard, and the additional letters are available through the key.
On
Macintosh
Mac is a brand of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 1984. The name is short for Macintosh (its official name until 1999), a reference to the McIntosh (apple), McIntosh apple. The current product lineup inclu ...
computers, the ''Swedish'' and ''Swedish Pro'' keyboards differ somewhat from the image shown above, especially as regards the characters available using the or keys. (on the upper row) produces the sign, and produces the sign. The digit keys produce with and with .
On
Linux
Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...
systems, the Swedish keyboard may also give access to additional characters as follows:
* first row: and
* second row: and
* third row: and
* fourth row: and
Several of these characters function as
dead key
A dead key is a special kind of modifier key on a mechanical typewriter, or computer keyboard, that is typically used to attach a specific diacritic to a base letter (alphabet), letter. The dead key does not generate a (complete) grapheme, charact ...
s.
Turkish

As of 2022, the majority of Turkish keyboards are based on QWERTY (the so-called Q-keyboard layout), although there is also the older
F-keyboard layout specifically designed for the language.
Vietnamese

The
Vietnamese keyboard layout is an extended Latin QWERTY layout. The letters Ă, Â, Ê, and Ô are found on what would be the number keys – on the US English keyboard, with – producing the tonal marks (
grave accent
The grave accent () ( or ) is a diacritical mark used to varying degrees in French, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan and many other Western European languages as well as for a few unusual uses in English. It is also used in other ...
,
hook
A hook is a tool consisting of a length of material, typically metal, that contains a portion that is curved/bent back or has a deeply grooved indentation, which serves to grab, latch or in any way attach itself onto another object. The hook's d ...
,
tilde
The tilde (, also ) is a grapheme or with a number of uses. The name of the character came into English from Spanish , which in turn came from the Latin , meaning 'title' or 'superscription'. Its primary use is as a diacritic (accent) in ...
,
acute accent
The acute accent (), ,
is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin alphabet, Latin, Cyrillic script, Cyrillic, and Greek alphabet, Greek scripts. For the most commonly encountered uses of the accen ...
and
dot below
When used as a diacritic mark, the term dot refers to the glyphs "combining dot above" (, and "combining dot below" (
which may be combined with some letters of the extended Latin alphabets in use in
a variety of languages. Similar marks are ...
, in that order), producing Đ, producing the
đồng sign (₫) when not shifted, and brackets () producing Ư and Ơ.
Multilingual variants
Multilingual
Multilingualism is the use of more than one language, either by an individual speaker or by a group of speakers. When the languages are just two, it is usually called bilingualism. It is believed that multilingual speakers outnumber monolin ...
keyboard layouts, unlike the default layouts supplied for one language and market, try to make it possible for the user to type in any of several languages using the same number of keys. Mostly this is done by adding a further virtual layer in addition to the -key by means of (or 'right ' reused as such), which contains a further repertoire of symbols and diacritics used by the desired languages.
This section also tries to arrange the layouts in ascending order by the number of possible languages and not chronologically according to the Latin alphabet as usual.
Canadian CSA Z243.200:92
The CSA keyboard layout (also named Canadian Multilingual Standard – CMS) is used by some Canadians, mostly in Quebec and New-Brunswick. Though the
caret
Caret () is the name used familiarly for the character provided on most QWERTY keyboards by typing . The symbol has a variety of uses in programming and mathematics. The name "caret" arose from its visual similarity to the original proofre ...
() is missing, it is easily inserted by typing the circumflex accent followed by a space. This layout use three levels and two groups, up to 5 characters per key. Alt-Gr key is used to type a character on the level 3 and the Group 2 has a dedicated key instead of the Right-Ctrl .
United Kingdom (Extended) Layout
Windows
From
Windows XP SP2 onwards, Microsoft has included a variant of the British QWERTY keyboard (the "United Kingdom Extended" keyboard layout) that can additionally generate several
diacritic
A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacrit ...
al marks. This supports input on a standard physical UK keyboard for many languages without changing positions of frequently used keys, which is useful when working with text in
Welsh,
Scottish Gaelic
Scottish Gaelic (, ; Endonym and exonym, endonym: ), also known as Scots Gaelic or simply Gaelic, is a Celtic language native to the Gaels of Scotland. As a member of the Goidelic language, Goidelic branch of Celtic, Scottish Gaelic, alongs ...
and Irish — languages native to parts of the UK (
Wales
Wales ( ) is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is bordered by the Irish Sea to the north and west, England to the England–Wales border, east, the Bristol Channel to the south, and the Celtic ...
,
parts of Scotland and
Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland ( ; ) is a Countries of the United Kingdom, part of the United Kingdom in the north-east of the island of Ireland. It has been #Descriptions, variously described as a country, province or region. Northern Ireland shares Repub ...
respectively).
In this layout, the grave accent key () becomes, as it also does in the US International layout, a
dead key
A dead key is a special kind of modifier key on a mechanical typewriter, or computer keyboard, that is typically used to attach a specific diacritic to a base letter (alphabet), letter. The dead key does not generate a (complete) grapheme, charact ...
modifying the character generated by the next key pressed. The apostrophe, double-quote, tilde and circumflex (
caret
Caret () is the name used familiarly for the character provided on most QWERTY keyboards by typing . The symbol has a variety of uses in programming and mathematics. The name "caret" arose from its visual similarity to the original proofre ...
) keys are not changed, becoming dead keys only when 'shifted' with . Additional
precomposed character
A precomposed character (alternatively composite character or decomposable character) is a Unicode entity that can also be defined as a sequence of one or more other characters. A precomposed character may typically represent a letter with a diac ...
s are also obtained by shifting the 'normal' key using the key. The extended keyboard is software installed from the Windows
control panel, and the extended characters are not normally engraved on keyboards.
The UK Extended keyboard uses mostly the AltGr key to add diacritics to the letters a, e, i, n, o, u, w and y (the last two being used in Welsh) as appropriate for each character, as well as to their capitals. Pressing the key and then a character that does not take the specific diacritic produces the behaviour of a standard keyboard. The key presses followed by spacebar generate a stand-alone mark.:
*
grave accent
The grave accent () ( or ) is a diacritical mark used to varying degrees in French, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan and many other Western European languages as well as for a few unusual uses in English. It is also used in other ...
s (e.g. à, è, etc.) needed for Scots Gaelic are generated by pressing the grave accent (or 'backtick') key , which is a dead key, then the letter. Thus produces à.
*
acute accent
The acute accent (), ,
is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin alphabet, Latin, Cyrillic script, Cyrillic, and Greek alphabet, Greek scripts. For the most commonly encountered uses of the accen ...
s (e.g. á) needed for Irish are generated by pressing the key together with the letter (or acting as a dead key combination followed by the letter). Thus produces á; produces Á. (Some programs use the combination of and a letter for other functions, in which case the method must be used to generate acute accents).
* the
circumflex
The circumflex () is a diacritic in the Latin and Greek scripts that is also used in the written forms of many languages and in various romanization and transcription schemes. It received its English name from "bent around"a translation of ...
diacritic needed for Welsh may be added by , acting as a dead key combination, followed by the letter. Thus then produces â, then produces the letter ŵ.
Some other languages commonly studied in the UK and Ireland are also supported to some extent:
*
diaeresis or umlaut (e.g. ä, ë, ö, etc.) is generated by a dead key combination , then the letter. Thus produces ä.
*
tilde
The tilde (, also ) is a grapheme or with a number of uses. The name of the character came into English from Spanish , which in turn came from the Latin , meaning 'title' or 'superscription'. Its primary use is as a diacritic (accent) in ...
(e.g. ã, ñ, õ, etc., as used in Spanish and Portuguese) is generated by dead key combination , then the letter. Thus produces ã.
*
cedilla
A cedilla ( ; from Spanish language, Spanish ', "small ''ceda''", i.e. small "z"), or cedille (from French , ), is a hook or tail () added under certain letters (as a diacritic, diacritical mark) to indicate that their pronunciation is modif ...
(e.g. ç) under c is generated by , and the capital letter (Ç) is produced by
The and letter method used for acutes and cedillas does not work for applications which assign shortcut menu functions to these key combinations.
These combinations are intended to be
mnemonic
A mnemonic device ( ), memory trick or memory device is any learning technique that aids information retention or retrieval in the human memory, often by associating the information with something that is easier to remember.
It makes use of e ...
and designed to be easy to remember: the circumflex accent (e.g. â) is similar to the free-standing circumflex (caret) (
^
), printed above the key; the diaeresis/umlaut (e.g. ö) is visually similar to the double-quote (
"
) above on the UK keyboard; the tilde (
~
) is printed on the same key as the .
The UK Extended layout is almost entirely transparent to users familiar with the UK layout. A machine with the extended layout behaves exactly as with the standard UK, except for the rarely used grave accent key. This makes this layout suitable for a machine for shared or public use by a user population in which some use the extended functions.
Despite being created for multilingual users, UK-Extended in Windows does have some gaps — there are many languages that it cannot cope with, including Romanian and Turkish, and all languages with different
character sets
Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical character (computing), characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using computers. The numerical v ...
, such as Greek and Russian. It also does not cater for
thorn (þ, Þ) in
Old English
Old English ( or , or ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the Early Middle Ages. It developed from the languages brought to Great Britain by Anglo-S ...
, the ß in German, the œ in French, nor for the å, æ, ø, ð, þ in Nordic languages.
ChromeOS
The UK Extended layout in
ChromeOS
ChromeOS, sometimes styled as chromeOS and formerly styled as Chrome OS, is an operating system designed and developed by Google. It is derived from the open-source operating system and uses the Google Chrome web browser as its principal user ...
provides all the same combinations as with Windows, but adds many more symbols and dead keys via AltGr.
Notes: Dotted circle (◌) is used here to indicate a dead key. The key is the only one that acts as a free-standing dead key and thus does not respond as shown on the key-cap. All others are invoked by AltGr.
(°) is a
degree sign
The degree symbol or degree sign, , is a glyph or symbol that is used, among other things, to represent degrees of arc (e.g. in geographic coordinate systems), hours (in the medical field), degrees of temperature or alcohol proof. The symbol ...
; (º) is a masculine
ordinal indicator
In written languages, an ordinal indicator is a character, or group of characters, following a numeral denoting that it is an ordinal number, rather than a cardinal number. Historically these letters were "elevated terminals", that is to say ...
*Dead keys
** produces grave accents (e.g., ) ( produces a standalone grave sign).
** (release) produces diaeresis accents (e.g., )
**(release) produces circumflex accents (e.g., )
** (release) produces (mainly)
comma diacritic or cedilla below the letter e.g.,
** (release) produces a
hook (diacritic)
In typesetting, the hook or tail is a diacritic mark attached to letters in many alphabets. In shape it looks like a hook and it can be attached below as a descender, on top as an ascender (typography), ascender and sometimes to the side. The o ...
on vowels (e.g., )
**AltGr+
same as AltGr+2
**AltGr+same as AltGr+#
**(release) produces
overrings (e.g., )
**(release) produces
macrons (e.g., )
**(release) produces mainly
horn (diacritic)
The horn ( or ) is a diacritic mark attached to the top right corner of the letters o and u in the Vietnamese alphabet to give ơ and ư, unrounded variants of the vowel represented by the basic letter. In Vietnamese, they are rarely considered ...
s (e.g., )
**(release) produces an adjacent horn (e.g., )
**(release) produces acute accents (e.g., )
**(release) produces
double acute accent
The double acute accent () is a diacritic mark of the Latin and Cyrillic scripts. It is used primarily in Hungarian or Chuvash, and consequently it is sometimes referred to by typographers as hungarumlaut. The signs formed with a regular umlau ...
s on some letters (e.g., ) that exist in Unicode as pre-composed characters
** (release) produces
acute accent
The acute accent (), ,
is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin alphabet, Latin, Cyrillic script, Cyrillic, and Greek alphabet, Greek scripts. For the most commonly encountered uses of the accen ...
s (e.g., )
** (release) produces
caron
A caron or háček ( ), is a diacritic mark () placed over certain letters in the orthography of some languages, to indicate a change of the related letter's pronunciation.
Typographers tend to use the term ''caron'', while linguists prefer ...
(haček) diacritics (e.g., )
** (release) produces
tilde
The tilde (, also ) is a grapheme or with a number of uses. The name of the character came into English from Spanish , which in turn came from the Latin , meaning 'title' or 'superscription'. Its primary use is as a diacritic (accent) in ...
diacritics (e.g., )
** (release) produces inverted
breve
A breve ( , less often , grammatical gender, neuter form of the Latin "short, brief") is the diacritic mark , shaped like the bottom half of a circle. As used in Ancient Greek, it is also called , . It resembles the caron (, the wedge or in ...
diacritics (e.g., )
**(release) produces mainly
underdots (e.g., )
**(release) produces mainly
overdots (e.g., )
Finally, any arbitrary Unicode
glyph
A glyph ( ) is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language. A ...
can be produced given its hexadecimal
code point
A code point, codepoint or code position is a particular position in a Table (database), table, where the position has been assigned a meaning. The table may be one dimensional (a column), two dimensional (like cells in a spreadsheet), three dime ...
: , release, then the hex value, then or . For example (release) produces the
Ethiopic syllable SEE, ሴ.
US-International
Windows and Linux

An alternative layout uses the physical US keyboard to type diacritics in some operating systems (including Windows). This is the US-International layout setting, which uses the right key as an key to support many additional characters directly as an additional shift key. (Since many smaller keyboards do not have a right- key, Windows also allows + to be used as a substitute for .) This layout also uses keys , , , and as
dead key
A dead key is a special kind of modifier key on a mechanical typewriter, or computer keyboard, that is typically used to attach a specific diacritic to a base letter (alphabet), letter. The dead key does not generate a (complete) grapheme, charact ...
s to generate characters with diacritics by pressing the appropriate key, then the letter on the keyboard. The international keyboard is a software setting installed from the Windows control panel or similar; the additional functions (shown in blue) may or may not be engraved on the keyboard, but are always functional. It can be used to type most major languages from Western Europe:
Afrikaans
Afrikaans is a West Germanic languages, West Germanic language spoken in South Africa, Namibia and to a lesser extent Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe and also Argentina where there is a group in Sarmiento, Chubut, Sarmiento that speaks the Pat ...
,
Danish,
Dutch,
English,
Faroese,
German
German(s) may refer to:
* Germany, the country of the Germans and German things
**Germania (Roman era)
* Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language
** For citizenship in Germany, see also Ge ...
,
Icelandic,
Irish,
Italian
Italian(s) may refer to:
* Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries
** Italians, a Romance ethnic group related to or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom
** Italian language, a Romance languag ...
,
Norwegian,
Portuguese,
Scottish Gaelic
Scottish Gaelic (, ; Endonym and exonym, endonym: ), also known as Scots Gaelic or simply Gaelic, is a Celtic language native to the Gaels of Scotland. As a member of the Goidelic language, Goidelic branch of Celtic, Scottish Gaelic, alongs ...
,
Spanish
Spanish might refer to:
* Items from or related to Spain:
**Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain
**Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many countries in the Americas
**Spanish cuisine
**Spanish history
**Spanish culture
...
, and
Swedish. On Windows, it is not sufficient for
French because it lacks the grapheme "
œ/Œ" (as does every keyboard layout provided by Windows except the
Canadian multilingual standard keyboard). Some less common western and central European languages (such as
Welsh,
Maltese,
Czech
Czech may refer to:
* Anything from or related to the Czech Republic, a country in Europe
** Czech language
** Czechs, the people of the area
** Czech culture
** Czech cuisine
* One of three mythical brothers, Lech, Czech, and Rus
*Czech (surnam ...
,
Finnish,
Estonian
Estonian may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to Estonia, a country in the Baltic region in northern Europe
* Estonians, people from Estonia, or of Estonian descent
* Estonian language
* Estonian cuisine
* Estonian culture
See also ...
and
Hungarian), are not fully supported by the US-International keyboard layout because of their use of additional
diacritic
A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacrit ...
s or
precomposed character
A precomposed character (alternatively composite character or decomposable character) is a Unicode entity that can also be defined as a sequence of one or more other characters. A precomposed character may typically represent a letter with a diac ...
s.
A diacritic key is activated by pressing and releasing it, then pressing the letter that requires the diacritic. After the two strokes, the single character with diacritics is generated. Note that only certain letters, such as vowels and "n", can have diacritics in this way.
To generate an accented character with one of the diacritics , , , and , press the relevant accent key then the character to be accented. Characters with diacritics can be typed with the following combinations:
* + vowel → vowel with acute accent, e.g., → é
* + vowel → vowel with grave accent, e.g., → è
* + vowel → vowel with diaeresis (or umlaut), e.g., → ë
* + vowel → vowel with circumflex accent, e.g., → ê
* + , or → letter with tilde, e.g. → ñ, → õ
* + → ç (Windows) or ć (X11)
* + → ç (X11)
The US-International layout is not entirely transparent to users familiar with the conventional US layout; when using a machine with the international layout setting active, the commonly used single- and double-quote keys and the less commonly used grave accent, tilde, and circumflex (caret) keys are dead keys and thus behave unconventionally. This could be disconcerting on a machine for shared or public use.
There are also alternative US-International mappings, whereby modifier keys such as shift and alt are used, and the keys for the characters with diacritics are in different places from their unmodified counterparts. For example, the right-Alt key may be remapped as an AltGr modifier key or as a
compose key
A compose key (sometimes called multi key) is a key on a computer keyboard that indicates that the following (usually 2 or more) keystrokes trigger the insertion of an alternate character, typically a precomposed character or a symbol.
For insta ...
and the dead key function deactivated, so that they (the ASCII quotation marks and circumflex symbol) can be typed normally with a single keystroke.
US-International in the Netherlands
The standard keyboard layout in the
Netherlands
, Terminology of the Low Countries, informally Holland, is a country in Northwestern Europe, with Caribbean Netherlands, overseas territories in the Caribbean. It is the largest of the four constituent countries of the Kingdom of the Nether ...
is the
US ANSI-standard QWERTY keyboard, with Windows supplementary keys. The standard keyboard mapping used is US-International, as it provides easy access to the diacritics used in Dutch. The
Dutch layout is historical, and keyboards with this layout are rarely used unlike in the past when typewriters were ubiquitous. The US-style keyboards sold in the Netherlands do not have the extra US-International characters or engraved on the keys, although the
euro symbol (€) () always is. Using this layout, the right-hand key functions as an key.
Apple International English Keyboard
There are three kinds of
Apple Keyboard
Apple Inc.
Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, in Silicon Valley. It is best known for its consumer electronics, software, and services. Founded in 1976 ...
s for English: the
United States
The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...
, the
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Northwestern Europe, off the coast of European mainland, the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...
and International English. The International English version features the same changes as the United Kingdom version, only without substituting for the symbol on , and as well lacking visual indication for the symbol on (although this shortcut is present with all Apple QWERTY layouts).
Differences from the US layout are:
# The key is located on the left of the key, and the } key is located on the right of the key.
# The key is added on the left of the key.
# The left key is shortened and the key has the shape of inverted L.
Finnish multilingual

The visual layout used in
Finland
Finland, officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country in Northern Europe. It borders Sweden to the northwest, Norway to the north, and Russia to the east, with the Gulf of Bothnia to the west and the Gulf of Finland to the south, ...
is basically the same as the
Swedish layout. This is practical, as
Finnish and
Swedish share the special characters
Ä/ä and
Ö/ö, and while the Swedish
Å/å is unnecessary for writing Finnish, it is needed by
Swedish-speaking Finns
The Swedish-speaking population of Finland (whose members are called by many names—see below; ; ) is a linguistic minority in Finland. They maintain a strong identity and are seen either as a separate cultural, ethnic or linguistic group or ...
and to write Swedish family names which are common. However, it lacks the letters
Š/š and
Ž/ž which are used in some Finnish loanwords like ''šaahi'' '
shah
Shāh (; ) is a royal title meaning "king" in the Persian language.Yarshater, Ehsa, ''Iranian Studies'', vol. XXII, no. 1 (1989) Though chiefly associated with the monarchs of Iran, it was also used to refer to the leaders of numerous Per ...
' and ''džonkki'' '
junk'.
As of 2008, there is a new standard for the Finnish multilingual keyboard layout, developed as part of a
localization project by
CSC. All the engravings of the traditional Finnish–Swedish visual layout have been retained, so there is no need to change the hardware, but the functionality has been extended considerably, as additional characters (e.g.,
Æ/æ,
Ə/ə,
Ʒ/ʒ) are available through the key, as well as
dead key
A dead key is a special kind of modifier key on a mechanical typewriter, or computer keyboard, that is typically used to attach a specific diacritic to a base letter (alphabet), letter. The dead key does not generate a (complete) grapheme, charact ...
s, which allow typing a wide variety of letters with
diacritic
A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacrit ...
s (e.g.,
Ç/ç,
Ǥ/ǥ,
Ǯ/ǯ).
Based on the
Latin
Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...
letter repertory included in the Multilingual European Subset No. 2 (
MES-2) of the Unicode standard, the layout has three main objectives. First, it provides for easy entering of text in both Finnish and Swedish, the two official
languages of Finland, using the familiar keyboard layout but adding some advanced punctuation options, such as
dash
The dash is a punctuation mark consisting of a long horizontal line. It is similar in appearance to the hyphen but is longer and sometimes higher from the baseline. The most common versions are the endash , generally longer than the hyphen ...
es, typographical
quotation marks
Quotation marks are punctuation marks used in pairs in various writing systems to identify direct speech, a quotation, or a phrase. The pair consists of an opening quotation mark and a closing quotation mark, which may or may not be the sa ...
, and the
non-breaking space
In word processing and digital typesetting, a non-breaking space (), also called NBSP, required space, hard space, or fixed space ...
(NBSP).
Second, it is designed to offer an indirect but intuitive way to enter the special letters and diacritics needed by the other three
Nordic national languages (
Danish,
Norwegian and
Icelandic) as well as the regional and minority languages (
Northern Sámi
Northern Sámi or North Sámi ( ; ; ; ; ; disapproved exonym Lappish or Lapp) is the most widely spoken of all Sámi languages. The area where Northern Sámi is spoken covers the northern parts of Norway, Sweden and Finland.
Geographic distr ...
,
Southern Sámi
Southern or South Sámi (; ; ) is the southwesternmost of the Sámi languages, and is spoken in Norway and Sweden. It is an endangered language. The designated main village of the language in Norway is Snåasen Municipality (Snåsa) where the c ...
,
Lule Sámi,
Inari Sámi,
Skolt Sámi
Skolt Sámi (, , ; or , , ) is a Sámi languages, Sámi language that is spoken by the Skolts, with approximately 300 speakers in Finland, mainly in Sevettijärvi and approximately 20–30 speakers of the (Notozero) dialect in an area surround ...
,
Romani language
Romani ( ; also Romanes , Romany, Roma; ) is an Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan macrolanguage of the Romani people. The largest of these are Vlax Romani language, Vlax Romani (about 500,000 speakers), Balkan Romani (600,000), and Sinte Roma ...
as spoken in Finland,
Faroese,
Kalaallisut also known as Greenlandic, and
German
German(s) may refer to:
* Germany, the country of the Germans and German things
**Germania (Roman era)
* Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language
** For citizenship in Germany, see also Ge ...
).
As a third objective, it allows for relatively easy entering of particularly names (of persons, places or products) in a variety of European languages using a more or less extended Latin alphabet, such as the official
languages of the European Union
The European Union (EU) has 24 official languages, of which three English, French and Germanwere considered "procedural" languages, but this notion was abandoned by the European Commission (whereas the European Parliament accepts all offic ...
(excluding
Bulgarian and
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor of all kno ...
). Some letters, like
Ł/ł needed for Slavic languages, are accessed by a special "overstrike" key combination acting like a dead key.
However, the
Romanian letters
Ș/ș and
Ț/ț (S/s and T/t with
comma below) are not supported; the presumption is that
Ş/ş and
Ţ/ţ (with
cedilla
A cedilla ( ; from Spanish language, Spanish ', "small ''ceda''", i.e. small "z"), or cedille (from French , ), is a hook or tail () added under certain letters (as a diacritic, diacritical mark) to indicate that their pronunciation is modif ...
) suffice as surrogates.
EurKEY

EurKEY, a
multilingual
Multilingualism is the use of more than one language, either by an individual speaker or by a group of speakers. When the languages are just two, it is usually called bilingualism. It is believed that multilingual speakers outnumber monolin ...
keyboard layout which is intended for Europeans, programmers and translators uses true QWERTY (US layout) as base just adding a third and fourth layer available through the key and +. These additional layers allows the users to type the symbolism of many European languages, special characters, the Greek alphabet (via
dead key
A dead key is a special kind of modifier key on a mechanical typewriter, or computer keyboard, that is typically used to attach a specific diacritic to a base letter (alphabet), letter. The dead key does not generate a (complete) grapheme, charact ...
s), and many common mathematical symbols.
Unlike most of the other QWERTY layouts which are standards for a country or region, EurKEY is not a standard of the European Union, yet that is why a petition of
EurKEY as European standard was started.
To address the ergonomics issue of QWERTY,
EurKEY Colemak-DH was also developed a
Colmak-DH version with the EurKEY design principals.
See also
*
Dvorak Simplified Keyboard
Dvorak () is a keyboard layout for English patented in 1936 by August Dvorak and his brother-in-law, William Dealey, as a faster and more ergonomic alternative to the QWERTY layout (the ''de facto'' standard keyboard layout). Dvorak propone ...
, designed for Brazilian Portuguese
References
Informational notes
Citations
{{DEFAULTSORT:Qwerty keyboard language variants
Latin-script keyboard layouts
Computing-related lists