GUIDE
AZERTY, BEPO and the French Keyboard You Will Actually Sit At
France, Belgium and Quebec do not share one French keyboard. The four layouts a French typist meets, and what the 2019 AFNOR standard changed.
By the Typetera team · Updated
There is no single French keyboard
A typist who has only ever used one machine tends to assume French has a keyboard the way it has a dictionary. It does not. France types on AZERTY. Belgium types on a different AZERTY, close enough to look identical and different enough to catch you out. Quebec types on a QWERTY based layout with its own accent handling, which surprises almost everybody outside Canada. And a minority of French typists have moved to BEPO, a redesign from the ground up. Four layouts, all of them producing correct French, none of them interchangeable under your fingers. If you are about to spend months building muscle memory, it is worth knowing which one you are building it for.
French AZERTY, and what it does well
The thing classic AZERTY gets right is the accented letters that French uses constantly. On the digits row, e acute, e grave, c cedilla and a grave are available directly, without a dead key and without a modifier, which is why a French typist rarely thinks about them at all. The circumflex and the diaeresis are dead keys: press, nothing appears, then the vowel arrives accented. The cost of that generosity is the digits themselves, which need the shift key, so anyone typing numbers all day is pressing two keys for every one. That trade is the single most argued point about AZERTY, and whether it is the right one depends entirely on whether your work is prose or figures.
Belgian AZERTY and Canadian French
Belgian AZERTY keeps the letters where a French typist expects them and differs in the corners: roughly one key in twenty carries a different symbol, the at sign and the brackets are on other keys or under a different modifier, and Belgium provides dead keys for the acute and grave accents that France does not. Somebody moving between Paris and Brussels loses almost nothing on letters and stumbles repeatedly on punctuation, which is the more annoying half when you are typing code or an email address. Quebec is a larger surprise: the standard there is a QWERTY based Canadian French layout, so the letters are in the American positions and the accents are produced with dead keys and a modifier. A French typist who learnt on AZERTY and sits down in Montreal is not slightly slowed, they are starting again.
What AFNOR standardised in 2019
Until recently AZERTY was a convention rather than a standard: no document said where anything belonged, which is why manufacturers differed in the corners. In April 2019, AFNOR published NF Z71-300, a voluntary standard commissioned by the Ministry of Culture, describing two layouts. The first is an improved AZERTY that keeps about ninety three per cent of the positions a French typist already knows and adds roughly sixty characters that the old layout made awkward or impossible, including the accented capitals, the French quotation marks and the characters needed for other Latin alphabets. The second is BEPO, standardised alongside it. Being a voluntary standard, it obliges nobody, and adoption has been slow: several years on, the keyboard sold with a new machine in France is usually still the old one.
BEPO, and who it is really for
BEPO was designed in 2003 on the principle Dvorak applied to English: put the most frequent letters under the strongest fingers and keep the hands alternating. The vowels sit on the left of the home row and the common consonants on the right, and the accented characters French needs are reachable without contortion. Typists who have made the change describe less finger travel and less strain, and the measurements support the travel claim. The honest caveat is the one that applies to every alternative layout. You will type slowly for weeks, you will need to install it on every machine you use, and you will be lost at any keyboard that is not yours, including the one in an examination room. BEPO repays somebody who writes French all day on their own machine. It punishes somebody who moves between machines.
Choosing, and then stopping thinking about it
The decision is mostly about where you type rather than what is theoretically fastest. If you sit examinations, use shared computers or work in an office that hands you a machine, stay on the AZERTY of the country you are in and spend the effort on technique instead, which is where the minutes actually are. If you own the machine and write prose on it every day, BEPO is a defensible investment with a real cost attached. Whichever you choose, learn the accents properly rather than leaving them for a correction pass afterwards: the common French mistake is not omitting an accent but pressing the vowel before the dead key has done its work, and that is a habit, not a layout problem.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Is Belgian AZERTY the same as French AZERTY?
+The letters are in the same places and roughly one key in twenty differs elsewhere, mostly punctuation and the symbols reached with a modifier. Moving between the two costs you symbols rather than words.
Do people in Quebec use AZERTY?
+No. The standard there is a QWERTY based Canadian French layout, so the letters sit in the American positions and the accents come from dead keys and a modifier key.
What is NF Z71-300?
+The French keyboard standard AFNOR published in April 2019. It describes an improved AZERTY that keeps most existing key positions and adds about sixty characters, and it standardises BEPO alongside it.
Is BEPO faster than AZERTY?
+It moves your fingers less, which is not the same claim. Expect weeks of slower typing while you relearn, and expect to be helpless at any keyboard that is not configured the way yours is.
Why do the digits need shift on a French keyboard?
+Because the unshifted positions are given to the accented letters French uses constantly. It is a deliberate trade that favours prose over figures, and it is the most argued point about the layout.
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