This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. The specific problem is: This article has a bad plan and presents information in disarray (for instance, the Belgian keyboard is oddly mentioned in Section “History”, facts about acute accents and tilde are found in Section “Grave accent”, and basic description of AZERTY is located very late in the article, in Section “Variants”; it is unclear what the said section is even supposed to be about); some assertions are redundant, some are contradictory or plainly wrong (like how to get an acute accent), some err towards the practical guide (like Section “Guillemets”), and some are only tangentially related to the matter (guillemets again); not mentioning, of course, that some non-obvious assertions lack a source (for instance, about usage of other layouts). Please help improve this article if you can.(April 2023) (Learn how and when to remove this message)
AZERTY (/əˈzɜːrti/ə-ZUR-tee) is a specific layout for the characters of the Latin alphabet on typewriter keys and computer keyboards. The layout takes its name from the first six letters to appear on the first row of alphabetical keys; that is, (AZERTY). Similar to the QWERTZ layout, it is modelled on the English QWERTY layout. It is used in France and Belgium, although each of these countries has its own national variation on the layout. Luxembourg and Switzerland use the Swiss QWERTZ keyboard. Most residents of Quebec, the mainly French-speaking province of Canada, use a QWERTY keyboard that has been adapted to the French language such as the Multilingual Standard keyboard CAN/CSA Z243.200-92 which is stipulated by the government of Quebec and the Government of Canada.[1][2][3]
The competing layouts devised for French (e.g., the ZHJAY layout put forward in 1907, Claude Marsan's 1976 layout, the 2002 Dvorak-fr, and the 2005 BÉPO layout) have obtained only limited recognition, although the latter has been included in the 2019 French keyboard layout standard.[4]
