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The AZERTY layout is a keyboard layout used in France, Belgium and some neighbouring countries. It differs from the QWERTY layout thus:
- 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 characters.
The French 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 ² and ³.
Some feel that these keys could be used for other characters used and needed in French, and because of this, some French people use the Canadian Multilingual standard keyboard. The Portuguese (Portugal) keyboard layout is also preferable, as it provides all the French accents (acute, grave, tréma, tilde, circumflex, cedilla, and also quotation marks «») and its dead-letter option for all the accent keys allow for easy input of all the possibilities in French and most other languages. Ç is, however, a separate key.
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 on different positions.
"AZERTY"