Layouts / latin · ISO
AZERTY (France)
France's national layout: A/Q and Z/W swapped, numbers behind Shift, and accents living on the number row.
Is AZERTY (France) worth learning?
There's no reliable evidence that switching to AZERTY (France) makes you type faster. The honest reason to learn it is hand comfort, not a speed edge. French keyboard owners, or anyone regularly typing French who wants direct access to accented characters without dead-key combinations.
How long does AZERTY (France) take to learn?
Real alternative-layout timelines converge on roughly 8 WPM by day 1, 53 WPM by day 30, and parity with your old speed by around day 90 of consistent daily practice. For AZERTY (France) specifically: 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.
History
Adopted in France in the early 20th century (commonly dated to a 1907 patent) as that country's variant of the typebar-era Latin keyboard, later codified by AFNOR. A revised standard (NF Z71-300, 2019) tried to fix long-standing complaints (proper support for ligatures, uppercase accents, and euro/Πplacement), but it's opt-in and the legacy layout implemented here remains what the overwhelming majority of French keyboards actually ship with.
Strengths
- 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
Honest tradeoffs
- 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