The QWERTZ or QWERTZU keyboard is a typewriter and keyboard layout widely used in Central and Southeast Europe. The name comes from the first six letters at the top left of the keyboard: .
The main difference between QWERTZ and QWERTY is that the positions of the and keys are switched (hence the nickname "kezboard"). This change possibly was made for three major reasons:
Similar to many other non-English keyboards:
Some of the special key inscriptions are often changed from an abbreviation to a graphical symbol (for example becomes a hollow arrow pointing up, becomes a left-pointing arrow). In German and Austrian keyboards, most of the other abbreviated labels are in German: (control) is translated to its German equivalent "Strg" for German: {{linktext|Steuerung, and is abbreviated "Entf" (German: {{linktext|entfernen). and on the numeric keypad are not translated, however. (See: Key labels)
The QWERTZ layout is fairly widely used in Germany and in the majority of Central European and Balkan countries that use the Latin script. Many German-speaking regions use this layout, but the German-speaking East Cantons of Belgium use AZERTY instead. Many of the other countries were historically a part of Austria-Hungary or under the influence of Nazi German occupation (and its underlying culture and technology), so they used German typewriters with the QWERTZ layout.
See main article: Albanian keyboard layout. QWERTZ is the default keyboard layout for the Albanian language in Microsoft Windows.[1]
See main article: German keyboard layout. The PC keyboard layout commonly used in Germany and Austria is based on one defined in a former edition (October 1988) of the German standard DIN 2137-2. The current edition DIN 2137:2012-06 standardizes it as the first (basic) one of three layouts, calling it “T1” (German: Tastaturbelegung 1, or “keyboard layout 1”).
It employs dead keys to type accented characters like, and the key to access characters in the third level (e.g.,,, the euro sign, or the micro-). 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 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]
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]
On some keyboards, the "" key is located to the left of the Enter key, while on others it is placed to the left of the backspace key (see the two pictures on the right).
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 key is positioned on the key to the right of the left 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 layer; on Macintosh computers, both layouts (QWERTY and QWERTZ) have this adaptation.[6]
A variant of the QWERTZ keyboard has been used in Poland, but QWERTY keyboards have been dominant since the early 1990s.
See main article: Romanian keyboard layout. 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" (S-comma) and "Ț" (T-comma) with "Ş" (S-cedilla; used in Turkic languages) and "Ţ" (T cedilla), the characters with cedilla were used in the layout (and these are still used in the default 1250 encoding). In 2012, a version with commas was made and it is available as a custom layout to be installed by the interested end-user.[7]
The Serbo-Croatian Latin and Slovene keyboard layout has five additional special characters Č, Ć, Ž, Š and Đ. This keyboard layout was standardized in the 1980s in Yugoslavia. Characters Ć and Đ are only part of Gaj's Latin alphabet but not part of the Slovene alphabet, nevertheless they remain in Slovenian keyboards (for economic reasons, for historical reasons and for writing words in the closely related South Slavic languages). The Ž is on the right side of the Ć key on keyboards which have a longer backspace key, and the usual inverted L-shaped Enter key. The layout makes heavy use of the AltGr (right Alt) key for non-alphabetic characters and dead key combinations for adding diacritics to Latin characters. It is possible to type German, Hungarian, Italian and Polish using only the Serbo-Croatian keyboard layout.
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 and are replaced with Љ (Lj) and Њ (Nj) respectively.
However, the Apple keyboards for Croatian are QWERTY.[9]
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 and the Swiss French 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 esszett (ß) ligature, on Windows its keyboard lacks the symbol in contrast to the German and Austrian QWERTZ layouts. Linux typically assigns ß to . While the German keyboard uses German labels for its keys (e.g. instead of), Swiss keyboards use the English abbreviations as a "neutral" solution to avoid favouring or excluding any of the national languages of Switzerland.
Unlike the Windows keyboard layouts used in France and Belgium, the Swiss layout does not have a key dedicated to the accented letter “ù”. The MacOS layout typically assigns this letter to .
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. Liechtenstein also use the Swiss German layout without an ß character.