AZERTY

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The Azerty keyboard layout on a laptop sold in Belgium.

The AZERTY Layout

The AZERTY layout is a keyboard layout used in France, Belgium and some neighbouring countries. It differs from the QWERTY layout like so:

A and Q are swapped
Z and W are swapped
M is moved from the right of N to the right of L (where colon/semicolon is on a US keyboard)
The digits 0 to 9 are on the same keys, but to be typed the shift key must be pressed. The unshifted positions are used for accented lowercase characters.

The French Windows and Linux AZERTY keyboard does not meet standards for the French language. The [Imprimerie Nationale recommends the use of accented capitals, but there are no dedicated keys to produce À Ç É È, or French quotation marks «» and ‹› (this gap is filled by text editors that automatically transform "). Also, it has many symbols on the normal and shifted state that are rarely used (e.g. § µ ²), which could be transferred to the AltGr state. The key to the left of 1 (` on UK/US keyboard) is blank when shifted, but on a Belgian AZERTY keyboard, this gap is filled with superscripts ² and ³. In Quebec the practice of initial capital accents is not generally followed.

The [Belgian AZERTY] was developed from the French AZERTY and some adaptions were made in the 1980s. All letters are the same as on the French keyboard, but some signs (? ! @ - _ + = §) are in different positions.