QWERTZ

The QWERTZ or QWERTZU keyboard is a widely used computer and typewriter keyboard layout that is mostly used in Central Europe. The name comes from the first six letters at the top left of the keyboard: Q, W, E, R, T, and Z.

The QWERTZ layout differs from the QWERTY layout in four major ways:

• The positions of the "Z" and "Y" keys are switched, this change being made for two major reasons:

• "Z" is a much more common letter than "Y" in German; the latter rarely appears outside words whose spellings reflect either their importation from a foreign language or the Hellenization of an older German form under the influence of Ludwig I of Bavaria.
• "T" and "Z" often appear next to each other in the German orthography, and placing the two keys next to each other minimizes the effort needed for typing the two characters in sequence (cf. the use of a single-block tz ligature in many early mechanical printing presses using fraktur typefaces).

• Part of the keyboard is adapted to include umlauted vowels (ä, ö, ü).
• The placements of some special symbols and command keys are changed, some of special key inscriptions are changed from an abbreviation to a graphical symbol (for example "Caps Lock" becomes a hollow arrow pointing down, "Backspace" becomes a left-pointing arrow), and most of the other abbreviations are replaced by German abbreviations (thus e.g. "Ctrl" for "control" is translated to its German equivalent "Strg" for "Steuerung"). "Esc" for "escape" is not translated however.
• Like many other non-English keyboards, QWERTZ keyboards usually change the right Alt key into an Alt Gr key to access a third level of key assignments. This is necessary because the umlauts and some other special characters leave no room to have all the special symbols of ASCII, needed by programmers among others, available on the first or second (shifted) levels without unduly increasing the size of the keyboard.

Models based on QWERTZ are used in the majority of Eastern Europe, South-Eastern Europe and Central European countries that use the Latin alphabet. A variant of the QWERTZ keyboard has been used in Poland, but QWERTY keyboards have been dominant since the early 1990s. Only German and Austrian QWERTZ keyboards have the Strg key; Swiss keyboards have the same key labeled ctrl as a "neutral" solution, as they are used for all four national languages of Switzerland.

A QWERTZ keyboard layout is sometimes informally nicknamed a kezboard, substituting the y with a z.

See also

• AZERTY
• QWERTY
• Blickensderfer typewriter
• Dvorak Simplified Keyboard
• Neo: Optimized German keyboard layout

References