AZERTY
AZERTY (/əˈzɜːrti/ ə-ZUR-tee) is a specific layout for the characters of the Latin alphabet on typewriter keys and computer keyboards.
[1] The AZERTY layout appeared in France in the last decade of the 19th century as a variation on American QWERTY typewriters.
In 1976, a QWERTY layout adapted to the French language was put forward, as an experimental standard (NF XP E55-060) by AFNOR.
This standard made provision for a temporary adaptation period during which the letters A, Q, Z and W could be positioned as in the traditional AZERTY layout.
A circumflex can be generated by first striking the ^ key (located to the right of P in most AZERTY layouts), then the vowel requiring the accent (with the exception of y).
In order to obtain characters, the Alt key must be pressed and held down while typing the relevant code into the numeric keypad.
Additionally with the ibus input method framework enabled, users may enter these characters into those applications that accept it by using Ctrl+⇧ Shift+U followed by their Unicode code points: either AB or BB, respectively.
In X11, the window system common to many flavors of UNIX, the keyboard interface is completely configurable, allowing each user to assign different functions to each key in line with their personal preferences.
Apart from these gaps, the French AZERTY layout has some strange features which are still present in the Microsoft Windows Vista operating system: In January 2016, the French Ministry of Culture, which is in charge of language affairs, expressed a will to offer an alternative to the AZERTY layouts traditionally proposed by the industry.
[5][8] The project, led by the French national organization for standardization AFNOR, released both this improved AZERTY and a BÉPO layout.
It allows typing words in many languages using dead keys, which are in blue on the picture, to access a variety of diacritics.
The Belgian AZERTY keyboard allows for the placing of accents on vowels without recourse to encoding via the Alt key + code.
This is because Belgium is predominantly bilingual (French-Dutch) and officially trilingual (a third language, German, is spoken in the East Cantons).
The key to the right of 0 on the numeric keypad corresponds either to the full stop or to the comma (which is why there are two distinct keyboard drivers under Windows).
The AZERTY keyboard as used in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, uses the name shift instead of maj and caps lock instead of verr maj. Owing to its widespread usage in France, Belgium and some African countries, the AZERTY layout has several variants.
It is the only keyboard layout provided by Microsoft Windows that allows to type the grapheme "Œ/œ", needed by French spelling.
Although there is no evidence of usage in French-speaking countries, it can be noticed that the keyboard layout of Portugal (QWERTY-based) has a strictly better coverage of French spelling than the various variants of AZERTY (as available in Windows): indeed, it supports all diacritics of French (acute accent, grave accent, circumflex, diaeresis) as dead keys (allowing for those diacritics on both lowercase and uppercase letters), it has a separate key for "ç" (allowing it to be uppercased) and it even features the French guillemets "«»"; however, it lacks the grapheme "œ/Œ", and lowercase accented letters of French are more cumbersome to type since they require pressing a dead key.
Some programmers prefer it over AZERTY, as it is closer to an international standard and allows easier input of ASCII punctuation characters which are used pervasively in programming languages.
As of 2024, only a few specialized manufacturers sell keyboards with the BÉPO layout printed on it; however, its practitioners use to type blindly, without looking at the keys, for increased efficiency, if at a higher learning cost.
QWERTY and QWERTZ adaptations of the layout are available for the physical keyboards used by major Amazigh (Berber) communities around the world.
