QWERTZ
The QWERTZ (
Overview
The main difference between QWERTZ and QWERTY is that the positions of the Z and Y keys are switched (hence the nickname "kezboard"[citation needed]). This change possibly was made for three major reasons:[citation needed]
- Z is a much more common letter than Y in German; the letter appears only in loanwords (mainly from Ancient Greek) and in proper names such as Meyer (alongside Meier and various other variants).
- T and Z often appear next to each other in the German orthography, and typewriter jamming would be reduced by placing the two keys so they could be typed with separate hands.
- Z and U are also next to each other. Zu, meaning "to" in German, and also a very common prefix can also be written very easily.
Similar to many other non-English keyboards:
- Part of the keyboard is adapted to include language-specific characters, e.g. umlauted vowels (ä, ö, ü) in German, Austrian, and Swiss (German) keyboards; and frequently used accented letters (é, è, à) in Swiss (French) 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 language-specific 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.
- The placements of some special symbols are changed when compared to the English (UK and US) versions of QWERTY.
Some of the special key inscriptions are often changed from an abbreviation to a graphical symbol (for example ⇪ Caps Lock becomes a hollow arrow pointing up, ← Backspace becomes a left-pointing arrow). In German and Austrian keyboards, most of the other abbreviated labels are in German: Ctrl (control) is translated to its German equivalent "Strg" for Steuerung, and Delete is abbreviated "Entf" (entfernen). Esc and ↵ Enter on the numeric keypad are not translated, however. (See: Key labels)
Variants
The QWERTZ layout is fairly widely used in Germany and in the majority of
Albanian
QWERTZ is the default keyboard layout for the Albanian language in Microsoft Windows.[1]
Austria and Germany
The PC keyboard layout commonly used in
It employs dead keys to type accented characters like “é”, and the AltGr key to access characters in the third level (e.g. “[”, “]”, “@”, the euro sign “€”, or the micro- “µ”). The “T2” layout as specified in the 2012 edition of the German standard also uses the group selection to access special characters like the long s, or foreign characters like “Æ” or “Ə”.
Sorbian
Sorbian QWERTZ is practically identical to the German layout, but the additional Sorbian characters can be entered with dead keys; it has three different layouts: Standard, Legacy, and Extended. All are supported by Microsoft Windows (Windows 7 and later only).[2]
Czech
The QWERTZ keyboard layout is commonly used in the
An internet poll in 2013 stated that 56% of Czech users used QWERTZ and 44% used QWERTY,[4] but in 2020 57% of Czech users used QWERTY and 43% used QWERTZ.[5]
Hungary
On some keyboards, the "
An unusual feature of this Hungarian keyboard layout is the position of the 0 (zero): it is located to the left of the 1, so that most of the accented characters can be together on the right side of the keyboard.
The official layout is of type QWERTZ, which is therefore the most widely used keyboard layout in the country. QWERTY used to be widespread due to there not being a dedicated Hungarian layout commonly available for older computers, but since this is no longer an issue, virtually everyone uses QWERTZ in everyday computing.
On "ISO" keyboards (as in the first picture) and "BAE" keyboards (as in the second), the Í key is positioned on the key to the right of the left ⇧ Shift key. To adapt to 101/104-key (ANSI) keyboards which do not have that key, the MS Windows QWERTY layout has put the Í on the usual key for the 0 (zero) while the 0 has been moved to that key's tertiary (AltGr) layer; on Macintosh computers, both layouts (QWERTY and QWERTZ) have this adaptation.[6]
Poland
A variant of the QWERTZ keyboard has been used in Poland, but QWERTY keyboards have been dominant since the early 1990s.
Romanian
The standard keyboard layout as established by the standard SR 13392:2004 is QWERTY. However, a Romanian QWERTZ keyboard (corresponding to older standards) was set up on Windows 3.1 and renamed "Romanian (Legacy)" on all versions since Windows Vista, because of the introduction of the two standard QWERTY layouts with the correct diacritics. Since it was devised before the disunification of "Ș" (
Slovak
Typewriters in Slovakia have used the QWERTZ layout quite similar to the layout used on the Czech typewriters. Slovak QWERTZ layout differs from the
South Slavic Latin
The
There is a proposed variant of new Slovene keyboard layout, which would remove Ć and Đ from top layout and add @ instead. The command keys would also become translated into Slovene and some minor second level layout changes would be made.[8]
For Serbian, there is also a Cyrillic keyboard variant, in which Q and W are replaced with Љ (Lj) and Њ (Nj) respectively.
However, the Apple keyboards for Croatian are QWERTY.[9]
Swiss (German, French, Italian, Romansh), Liechtenstein, Luxembourg
The layout of the Swiss keyboard is established by the national standard SN 074021:1999. It is designed to allow easy access to frequently used accents of the French, German and Italian languages and major currency signs. It was designed from the beginning for usage with multiple languages (not only those spoken in Switzerland) in mind.[10] The difference between the Swiss German (SG) and the Swiss French (SF) layout is that the German variety has the German umlauts (ä, ö, ü) accessible in the unshifted state, while the French version has some French accented characters (é, à, è) accessible in the unshifted state. The actual keyboards have the keys engraved for both variations; the difference is only in the driver (software) settings. In the latest versions of Windows there are also separately listed driver settings for Swiss Italian and Swiss Romansh, but they correspond to the Swiss French and Swiss German layout, respectively. In Mac OS X 10.6 and Linux, only Swiss French and Swiss German are available, and on iPadOS, the only layout for Switzerland is Swiss German.
As Swiss German does not make use of the
Unlike the Windows keyboard layouts used in France and Belgium, the Swiss layout does not have a key dedicated to the accented letter “ùo”. The MacOS layout typically assigns this letter to ⌥ Option+u.
Luxembourg does not have a keyboard layout of its own. Public education and administration use the Swiss-French keyboard which also represents the Microsoft Windows standard keyboard layout for Luxembourg, while some in the private sector prefer the Belgian AZERTY or American QWERTY layouts.[citation needed] Liechtenstein also use the Swiss German layout without an ß character.
See also
- AZERTY
- QWERTY
- QZERTY
- German keyboard layout
- Blickensderfer typewriter
- Dvorak keyboard layout
- Neo, an optimized German keyboard layout
- Enigma machine
References
- ^ "Microsoft's implementation of the Albanian layout". microsoft.com. Microsoft. Archived from the original on 2021-04-14. Retrieved 2020-08-09.
- ^ "Microsoft Keyboard Layouts". Microsoft. Archived from the original on 13 July 2017. Retrieved 26 May 2017.
- ^ "Je výhodnější rozložení kláves QWERTZ nebo QWERTY?". Archived from the original on 14 Dec 2007.
- ^ "Bitva o klávesnici: QWERTY, QWERTZ i naprostá exotika". Archived from the original on 2020-07-22. Retrieved 2020-07-22.
- ^ "Používáte na mobilu rozložení qwerty? Samsung vás konečně přestal ignorovat" (in Czech). 18 February 2020. Archived from the original on 23 July 2020. Retrieved 22 July 2020.
- ^ "Microsoft keyboard layouts". Archived from the original on 2017-02-17. Retrieved 2017-01-16.
- ^ Cristian Adam (27 November 2012). "The Română (Moștenit) keyboard" (in Romanian). Archived from the original on 28 August 2015. Retrieved 27 November 2012.
- ^ "SLOVENSKI STANDARD oSIST 1044" (PDF). February 2009. Archived from the original (PDF) on October 24, 2014. Retrieved September 14, 2013.
- ^ "How to identify keyboard localizations - Apple Support". Archived from the original on 2018-07-04. Retrieved 2018-11-24.
- ^ Informationstechnologie - Anordnung der alphanumerischen Tastenfelder für Geräte der Daten- und Textverarbeitung [Information technology - Arrangement of alphanumeric keypads for data and word processing devices] (in Swiss German). Vol. SN 074021:1999-01. Schweizerische Normen-Vereinigung (SNV). 1 Jan 1999. Archived from the original on 28 December 2022. Retrieved 28 December 2022.