Layouts / Compare
QWERTY (US) vs AZERTY (France)
QWERTY (US) and AZERTY (France) differ on 14 of their 36 letter and punctuation keys, about 39%. Neither has reliable evidence of being faster to type on: the honest reason to prefer one is hand comfort and shortcut habits, not speed. The real cost of switching is the few weeks spent below your old pace.
How different are QWERTY (US) and AZERTY (France)?
Of the 36 letter and punctuation keys the two layouts share a position for, 14 produce a different character, so about 39% of the typing keys move. The number and modifier keys stay put. Here is the home row, the row your fingers rest on, in each:
Is QWERTY (US) faster than AZERTY (France)?
There is no solid evidence that either layout makes you type faster. Controlled comparisons find that practice volume dwarfs layout choice, and the fastest typists in the CHI 2018 study of 136 million keystrokes (Dhakal et al.) win on rollover and rhythm, not on which layout they use. Optimized layouts do measurably cut finger travel and same-finger bigrams, which is a comfort and effort argument, not a speed promise.
How long does switching take?
Real alternative-layout timelines converge on roughly 8 WPM on day 1, about 53 WPM by day 30, and parity with your old speed near day 90 of consistent daily practice. For QWERTY (US): None if you already know it. If you're starting from scratch, expect the same weeks-to-months progression as any layout to reach a comfortable working speed. For AZERTY (France): A few weeks to get comfortable if you're coming from QWERTY: the letter swaps (A/Q, Z/W) are the easy part; unlearning "digits are unshifted" takes longer.
Which should you choose?
QWERTY (US): Anyone who isn't specifically chasing lower finger travel or fewer awkward stretches, which, realistically, is most people. Learning QWERTY well is almost always more valuable than learning an alternative layout badly.
AZERTY (France): French keyboard owners, or anyone regularly typing French who wants direct access to accented characters without dead-key combinations.
QWERTY (US)
The default layout almost everyone starts on: the baseline every other layout is measured against.
- Universal: every OS, keyboard, and how-to guide assumes it by default
- No relearning cost if you already type on it
- Full ecosystem of muscle-memory-dependent tools (shortcuts, games, typing tests) built around it
- Not designed around English letter frequency, so common letters land on weaker fingers (e.g. the pinky-heavy left hand)
- High rate of same-finger bigrams compared to layouts designed after computers existed
- Left hand does more work than the right despite most people being right-handed
AZERTY (France)
France's national layout: A/Q and Z/W swapped, numbers behind Shift, and accents living on the number row.
- The only layout most French speakers have ever used: universal in France, Belgium, and parts of Francophone Africa
- Direct, unshifted access to the accented letters (é, è, ç, à) that appear constantly in French prose
- Physical keyboards and OS defaults across the region assume it, so there's no driver/OS friction
- Digits require Shift, which is a genuine daily friction point for anything numeric: phone numbers, passwords, spreadsheets
- M sits where QWERTY has semicolon, and the vacated M key becomes a comma, which confuses touch typists coming from QWERTY
- Widely criticized even by French typists as ergonomically dated relative to modern alternatives; the 2019 standard exists partly because of this