History of the AZERTY keyboard

Nobody knows — and not for lack of trying. The contrast with QWERTY is striking : on the American side, an identified inventor (Christopher Latham Sholes), a dated patent (1878), a company (Remington) and a documented timeline. On the French side : no named inventor, no patent, no founding document. Contributors to Wikipedia have documented, since 2009 on the article’s talk page, fruitless searches for primary sources.

Only one chronological marker is solid. In 1907, the stenographer Albert Navarre proposed an alternative layout, the ZHJAY, designed from French letter frequencies. It failed commercially — and the reason is telling : professional typists were already trained on AZERTY and refused to relearn. In other words, by 1907 AZERTY was already entrenched enough to repel a better-thought-out rival. Its birth therefore sits somewhere in the last decade of the 19th century, without anyone being able to date it or attribute it.

The first mass-produced typewriter, developed by Christopher Latham Sholes, is sold by Remington from 1873. The traditional account, repeated everywhere for a century, credits the layout to a mechanical constraint : spacing out frequently struck letters so the type bars would not jam.

A Japanese academic study (Yasuoka & Yasuoka, “On the Prehistory of QWERTY”, 2011) proposes a different genealogy, based on Sholes’ successive prototypes : the keyboard is said to have formed in the service of telegraph operators transcribing American Morse on the fly — a use in which certain ambiguous code letters had to sit close together to be corrected quickly. The layout then froze with the Teletype and the emerging typewriting industry.

Who is right? Sholes never explained his choices, and both accounts coexist in the literature today. It is a lesson in humility that holds for this whole page : even the most documented keyboard in the world keeps its blind spots.

It is the most widespread received idea in the whole history of the keyboard, and it is false. The decisive argument is chronological : fast ten-finger touch typing was invented after QWERTY was fixed. You cannot have set out to slow down typists who did not yet exist — in Sholes’ day, people typed with two or four fingers, looking at the keyboard.

What the spacing of certain letter pairs targeted was the mechanical jamming of the type bars, not human speed : two neighbouring bars struck in quick succession risked colliding. And even that goal was only partly pursued : E and R, one of the most frequent pairs in English, stayed side by side — which definitively wrecks the hypothesis of a systematic slowdown. The myth survives anyway, because it makes a better story than the truth.

Nothing proves it. This theory — France supposedly altered the American keyboard on principle, to assert its distinctiveness — circulates in the media in a light-hearted tone. But no period document supports it, and the articles that relay it generally begin by admitting that “nobody really knows why” before offering it as a fallback explanation. It is a seductive retrospective reconstruction ; on the current state of the archives, a legend.

On QWERTY, the M sits bottom right, after the N ; on AZERTY, it migrated to the far right of the middle row, after the L, leaving its original spot to the comma. This move is one of AZERTY’s most distinctive traits — it is what most disorients QWERTY regulars — and its motive is documented nowhere.

The explanations you meet online — balancing the load between the hands, bringing the comma closer to the space bar, clearing the bottom row — are internet speculation, with no period source. The only attested thing is the fact itself : the M to the right of the L appears on the oldest documented AZERTY machines and has never moved since.

This is the best-understood AZERTY choice, even if the initial decision is undated. The functional logic is clear : relegating the digits to the Shift position freed the direct top row for the everyday accented letters of French — é, è, ç, à — which English had no need for. A French text contains many more “é” than “4” : over a day of typing, the trade-off holds up.

The compromise is attested at least since the typewriters of the 1950s (the 1951 Hermes Baby already shows it) — and it crossed into computing without ever being reconsidered. What is missing is the date and author of the initial decision, which no one has recovered. Note the paradox : the one AZERTY choice that explains itself well is also the one that today’s users — who type more digits and fewer letters than in 1900 — contest the most.

This may be the strangest of all : the period, one of the most frequent characters in French, demands a combination, while the semicolon — one of the rarest — is directly accessible. The inconsistency is noted by every technical description of AZERTY ; no historical source gives its reason, despite decades of user complaints.

The ù appears in practically a single French word — “où” (where) — and yet has a dedicated key, attested at least since 1951. Measured against the keystrokes it serves, it is probably the least cost-effective key on the whole keyboard.

The most common hypothesis is that it recycled a slot inherited from QWERTY — that of the American apostrophe, freed up during the French adaptation : rather than a decision in favour of ù, a simple filling of an empty slot. No source confirms it. A sign of the times : the 2019 AFNOR standard removed ù’s key precisely to reassign that slot to more useful characters.

Contrary to a widespread idea, the ² key does not come from the typewriter : documented mechanical AZERTY models have none. It belongs to the computer era — which makes its existence even more curious, since someone, in the days of the first French PCs, had to decide to devote a whole key to the superscript two.

A credible hypothesis links it to the French standardization work of the 1980s : Yves Neuville’s report (1985) envisaged a general superscript key, allowing ², ³ and others — of which only the ² would have survived the encoding constraints of PC keyboards. As the report is unfindable online, this lineage remains to be confirmed on the document itself. A detail that lends weight to a regional decision rather than an inheritance : Belgium, for its part, added a ³.

The dead key is a typewriter mechanism : a strike that prints the accent without advancing the carriage, followed by the letter that prints beneath it. The trade-off is arithmetic — a single circumflex dead key produces â, ê, î, ô, û, where direct access would demand five dedicated keys, on a machine that had only about forty.

The split was made by frequency : the five most common accented letters of French (é, è, à, ù, ç) received a direct-access key, everything else — circumflexes, diaereses — went to two strokes. The general principle is documented ; the detail of the trade-offs (why ù and not ê, for instance) is not. Computing inherited the mechanism as is, down to the name : our software “dead keys” simulate a carriage that no longer exists.

AZERTY was frozen at a time when braces, brackets and vertical bars did not exist as a writing need : in 1900, nobody typed { }. When computing made them essential, they were tucked into the AltGr layers — the third function of the already-crowded number keys — with no overall reorganization. Hence three-finger combinations for characters that code uses constantly, where the American QWERTY serves them in simple keystrokes.

The 2019 standard committee actually listed programming among its optimization criteria : the institutional admission that it had never been taken into account. The frustration of French-speaking developers is widely reported — many switch to QWERTY to code ; its real cost, however, has never been measured by a study.

WASD took hold in the mid-1990s through the competitive Quake scene — popularized notably by the champion Dennis “Thresh” Fong, who used it to combine keyboard movement with mouse aiming — then became the industry standard when Half-Life adopted it as the default in 1998.

ZQSD is only its positional transposition : the same physical keys, read on an AZERTY keyboard where W and A are called Z and Q. Nobody “decided” this conversion : it happened mechanically, game after game, with no documented founding act — to the point of becoming a cultural marker of French-speaking gaming. It is also why the alternative layouts that move those four letters lose the gamers : their reflexes are wired to the positions, not the letters.

The letters and the common accented characters are identical — a French person types on a Belgian keyboard without noticing, up to the first symbol. Because several symbols change place (§, !, *, £, µ, +, =), and the Belgian keyboard adds two things : a ³, and an acute-accent dead key — precious for Dutch (vóór), the other national language, and which incidentally gives access to É. The Belgian AZERTY is therefore not an imported French AZERTY : it is a bilingual adaptation.

A notable point : no official Belgian keyboard standard has been identified. The Belgian variant is a de facto manufacturers’ standard, never formalized — the history of the French AZERTY, in miniature.

Because North American computing was built on QWERTY, and Canadian standardization followed its market rather than France. The CSA Z243.200 standard (1992) defines a QWERTY keyboard adapted to French : letters, digits and punctuation stay at the American positions, and French characters (é, è, à, ç) are added by direct access or dead keys.

The Quebec case is precious for understanding this whole history : it proves that you can write French correctly on a QWERTY base — and therefore that AZERTY is not a linguistic necessity. The language did not determine the keyboard ; the continent did.

Because the keyboard follows the regional industrial market, never the language. France and Belgium inherited AZERTY from European typewriters ; Quebec, the North American QWERTY standardized by the CSA ; French-speaking Switzerland shares the Swiss national QWERTZ, a single keyboard designed to serve German, French and Italian speakers at once — whose precise institutional origin is, incidentally, not documented.

Four regions, one language, three families of keyboards : no French-speaking body ever coordinated these choices, and none tried. Each community received the keyboard of its industrial environment, then adapted it to its language — never the other way round.

Published on 2 April 2019 by AFNOR, it defines two layouts : an improved AZERTY — letters and digits unchanged, symbols entirely reorganized by statistical optimization — and a standardized version of bépo, the community ergonomic layout.

Rare for an industrial standard : its design drew on human-computer interaction researchers (Aalto University, Inria), on real typing corpora and on optimization algorithms, rather than committee negotiation alone. A public consultation in 2017 gathered over 3,000 comments — unheard of for an AFNOR document. The whole method is documented in detail in Nancel, 2018, the methodological appendix published in open access : it is today the best single source on the recent history of the French keyboard.

Because it is voluntary : it binds no one — not manufacturers, not system vendors, not administrations. Without a public-purchasing obligation or default pre-installation, a keyboard standard can rely only on the goodwill of the ecosystem ; it found little.

The figures speak : Windows only integrated the matching drivers (KBDFRNA.DLL and KBDFRNB.DLL, shipped with the 24H2 update) in October 2024, five and a half years after publication — and without making it the default layout. Conforming physical keyboards remain nowhere to be found in stores. The standard coexists with the traditional AZERTY ; it has not replaced it, and nothing indicates it will.

The answer comes down to two acronyms : ISO and ANSI, the two great physical keyboard formats. The ISO format, standard in Europe, has 105 keys : an inverted-L Enter key over two rows, a short left Shift, and an extra key lodged between the left Shift and W — the < > key on AZERTY. The ANSI format, standard in the United States, has 104 keys : a horizontal Enter, a long left Shift, and no 105th key — the < and > characters live elsewhere there, on other keys of the American layout.

Now some compact laptops and some imported keyboards — built first for the American market, or trimmed to save space — use an ANSI or hybrid chassis with AZERTY legends. The 105th key then physically does not exist, and < > become unreachable without a combination or software remapping. The system, for its part, still provides those characters : it is the physical keyboard that is amputated, not the layout.

The phenomenon illustrates a distinction this whole page relies on : the physical format (ISO or ANSI), the key marking (what is engraved) and the logical layout (what the system produces) are three different layers, which do not always coincide. Much of the confusion about “the French keyboard” comes from there.

Two forces combine. First, the economics of change : relearning to type costs weeks of discomfort and slowness, and the installed base, teaching, shared workstations and compatibility all play for the status quo. A better layout is not enough : it has to be enough better to justify the toll — and for most users, it is not.

Second, a little-known scientific debate : the paper “The Fable of the Keys” (Liebowitz & Margolis, 1990) re-examined the historical evidence for Dvorak’s superiority and showed that it came largely… from studies run by Dvorak himself. This does not prove that optimized layouts bring nothing — the comfort reported by bépo or Ergo-L users is real and consistent — but no modern independent measurement quantifies it. Our comparison details what these layouts change, and for whom.