AZERTY is the layout under French and Belgian fingers — QWERTY's closest sibling, renamed for its own top row. Below is the full French key arrangement with every difference from QWERTY highlighted, plus how the layout got this way and why France officially revised it in 2019.
Highlighted keys sit in different positions than on US QWERTY. Look at the number row: the unshifted characters are symbols and accented letters (& é " ' ( - è _ ç à) and the digits 1–0 are the small Shift characters in the corners — on AZERTY you hold Shift to type a number. The ² key, the ^ dead key for circumflex accents, and the dedicated ù key have no QWERTY equivalent at all.
AZERTY is QWERTY seen through a French lens. The skeleton is identical — same rows, same stagger, same Shift logic — but three letter changes define it: A and Q trade places, Z and W trade places, and M leaves QWERTY's bottom row to sit beside L, on the key where QWERTY puts the semicolon. Those five relocated letters are enough to make the two layouts mutually hostile: a touch typist crossing between them garbles every few words until their hands relearn the difference.
The bigger difference is the number row. On AZERTY the digits are the Shift characters: unshifted, the top row produces & é " ' ( - è _ ç à, and you hold Shift to get 1 through 0. The logic is French prose — é alone outranks a dozen ordinary letters in French frequency tables, and apostrophes and parentheses beat digits in everyday writing, so the frequent characters got the cheap keystrokes. The layout even spends an entire key on ù, a letter that occurs in exactly one French word (où), plus a dead key that turns ^ followed by a vowel into â, ê, î, ô or û.
For all its French tailoring, standard AZERTY is notoriously bad at French. There is no clean way to type accented capitals like É, À and Ç, no « guillemets » — the quotation marks French typography actually uses — and no œ, the ligature in cœur and œuvre. That indictment eventually came from the French state itself: a 2016 report for the Ministry of Culture concluded it was nearly impossible to write correct French on a keyboard sold in France, which triggered the standardization work that produced the revised AZERTY of 2019.
AZERTY appeared in France during the 1890s, in the first wave of QWERTY typewriters arriving from America. Nobody knows exactly who rearranged the keys or precisely why — no design document survives — but dealers and manufacturers converged on the arrangement, and by the early twentieth century it was the de facto French standard. It saw off at least one serious challenger: in 1907 Albert Navarre proposed his ZHJAY layout, rationally built on French letter frequencies, and it went nowhere. France's typists had already learned AZERTY — an early demonstration of the lock-in that later protected QWERTY worldwide.
Remarkably, AZERTY then survived more than a century without ever being officially standardized. France, unlike Germany with its DIN keyboard norm, had no national standard at all, so manufacturers shipped subtly divergent AZERTYs and the layout's flaws simply fossilized. The reckoning came in 2016, when a report for the Ministry of Culture declared that French could not be written correctly on keyboards sold in France and asked AFNOR, the national standards body, to fix it.
AFNOR published NF Z71-300 in April 2019 — France's first official keyboard standard. It defines two compliant layouts: an improved AZERTY that keeps every letter in place but reorganizes the symbol layers to give direct access to É À Ç È, « », œ and a better-placed @, and BÉPO, a Dvorak-style ergonomic layout designed around French. Compliance is voluntary, so the familiar 1890s arrangement still ships on most machines, but the revised layout is slowly spreading across government desks and enthusiast keyboards.
Five letter keys move: A↔Q and Z↔W swap, and M sits beside L on QWERTY's semicolon key. Beyond the letters, the number-row logic reverses — digits need Shift while symbols and accented letters are unshifted — and much of the punctuation is rearranged. The diagram above highlights every key that differs.
Because French prose uses accented letters and punctuation more than digits. The layout's typewriter-era designers gave é, è, ç, à, the apostrophe and the parentheses the cheap unshifted strokes and moved numbers to the Shift layer. It is a defensible trade for writing French and a famous annoyance for spreadsheets, passwords and programming.
The letters are identical, so typists move between the two easily, but several symbol keys differ — on the Belgian number row, § sits on the 6 key and ! on the 8 key, where France puts - and _. Belgium also uses AZERTY across both of its language communities, so Flemish Dutch is typed on it too.
The AFNOR standard NF Z71-300, published in April 2019, keeps every letter where it is but reworks the symbol layers: direct ways to type É À Ç È, « » guillemets, œ and æ, a more accessible @, and dozens of other characters. The same standard also defines BÉPO, an ergonomic French layout. Adoption is voluntary, so most keyboards sold today still carry the old arrangement.
Yes — the free AnyKeyboard French AZERTY keyboard linked below runs in your browser with the exact layout shown in the diagram. Click the keys or type on your physical keyboard, then copy the text anywhere. It is an easy way to type French accents from a QWERTY machine.