In this section you will also find keyboard layouts that include some additional symbols of other languages. But they are different from layouts that were designed with the goal to be usable for multiple languages (see Multilingual variants). The arrangement of the character input keys and the ⇧ Shift keys contained in this layout is specified in the US national standard ANSI- INCITS 154-1988 (R1999) (formerly ANSI X3.154-1988 (R1999)), [18] where this layout is called " ASCII keyboard". The complete US keyboard layout, as it is usually found, also contains the usual function keys in accordance with the international standard ISO/IEC 9995-2, although this is not explicitly required by the US American national standard. The current Romanian National Standard SR 13392:2004 establishes two layouts for Romanian keyboards: a "primary" [37] one and a "secondary" [38] one. Minor changes to the arrangement are made for other languages. There are a large number of different keyboard layouts used for different languages written in Latin script. They can be divided into three main families according to where the Q, A, Z, M, and Y keys are placed on the keyboard. These are usually named after the first six letters, for example this QWERTY layout and the AZERTY layout.

Contrary to popular belief, the QWERTY layout was not designed to slow the typist down, [2] :162 but rather to speed up typing. Indeed, there is evidence that, aside from the issue of jamming, placing often-used keys farther apart increases typing speed, because it encourages alternation between the hands. [11] (On the other hand, in the German keyboard the Z has been moved between the T and the U to help type the frequent digraphs TZ and ZU in that language.) Almost every word in the English language contains at least one vowel letter, but on the QWERTY keyboard only the vowel letter A is on the home row, which requires the typist's fingers to leave the home row for most words. United Kingdom (Extended) Layout United Kingdom Extended Keyboard Layout for Windows United Kingdom Extended Keyboard Layout for Linux United Kingdom International Keyboard Layout for LinuxFinally , instead of being the normal output of their keys, are produced by shifting the same keys. The QWERTY layout depicted in Sholes's 1878 patent is slightly different from the modern layout, most notably in the absence of the numerals 0 and 1, with each of the remaining numerals shifted one position to the left of their modern counterparts. The letter M is located at the end of the third row to the right of the letter L rather than on the fourth row to the right of the N, the letters X and C are reversed, and most punctuation marks are in different positions or are missing entirely. [6] 0 and 1 were omitted to simplify the design and reduce the manufacturing and maintenance costs; they were chosen specifically because they were "redundant" and could be recreated using other keys. Typists who learned on these machines learned the habit of using the uppercase letter I (or lowercase letter L) for the digit one, and the uppercase O for the zero. [7] Windows Vista and newer versions include the correct diacritical signs in the default Romanian Keyboard layout. Newer Apple "British" keyboards use a layout that is relatively unlike either the US or traditional UK keyboard. It uses an elongated return key, a shortened left ⇧ Shift with ` and ~ in the newly created position, and in the upper left of the keyboard are § and ± instead of the traditional EBCDIC codes. The middle-row key that fits inside the return key has \ and Pipe symbol.

US keyboards are used not only in the United States, but also in many other English-speaking places, (except UK and Ireland), including India, Australia, Anglophone Canada, Hong Kong, New Zealand, South Africa, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, and Indonesia that uses the same 26-letter alphabets as English. In many other English-speaking jurisdictions (e.g., Canada, Australia, the Caribbean nations, Hong Kong, Malaysia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Singapore, New Zealand, and South Africa), local spelling sometimes conforms more closely to British English usage, although these nations decided to use a US English keyboard layout. Until Windows 8 and later versions, when Microsoft separated the settings, this had the undesirable side effect of also setting the language to US English, rather than the local orthography.

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The QWERTY layout was devised and created in the early 1870s by Christopher Latham Sholes, a newspaper editor and printer who lived in Kenosha, Wisconsin. In October 1867, Sholes filed a patent application for his early writing machine he developed with the assistance of his friends Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soulé. [1] The UK Extended keyboard uses mostly the AltGr key to add diacritics to the letters a, e, i, n, o, u, w and y (the last two being used in Welsh) as appropriate for each character, as well as to their capitals. Pressing the key and then a character that does not take the specific diacritic produces the behaviour of a standard keyboard. The key presses followed by spacebar generate a stand-alone mark.: The AltGr and letter method used for acutes and cedillas does not work for applications which assign shortcut menu functions to these key combinations. For other French keyboard layouts, see AZERTY. A simplified Canadian French keyboard layout. A fully standard keyboard has significantly more symbols. [27]

Two keyboard layout that are based on Qwerty are used in Arabic-speaking countries. Microsoft designate them as Arabic (101) and Arabic (102). The central characteristics of the Swedish keyboard are the three additional letters Å/å, Ä/ä, and Ö/ö. The same visual layout is also in use in Finland and Estonia, as the letters Ä/ä and Ö/ö are shared with the Swedish language, and even Å/å is needed by Swedish-speaking Finns. However, the Finnish multilingual keyboard adds new letters and punctuation to the functional layout. In the era of mechanical typewriters, combined characters such as é and õ were created by the use of dead keys for the diacritics ( ′, ~), which did not move the paper forward. Thus the ′ and e would be printed at the same location on the paper, creating é. The Norwegian keyboard largely resembles the Swedish layout, but the Ö and Ä are replaced with Ø and Æ. The Danish keyboard is also similar, but it has the Ø and Æ swapped. On some systems, the Swedish or Finnish keyboard may allow typing Ø/ø and Æ/æ by holding the AltGr or ⌥ Option key while striking Ö and Ä, respectively.The "primary" layout is intended for traditional users who have learned how to type with older, Microsoft-style implementations of the Romanian keyboard. The "secondary" layout is mainly used by programmers as it does not contradict the physical arrangement of keys on a US-style keyboard. The "secondary" arrangement is used as the default Romanian layout by Linux distributions, as defined in the "X Keyboard Configuration Database". [39] Software keyboards on touchscreen devices usually make the Polish diacritics available as one of the alternatives which show up after long-pressing the corresponding Latin letter. [34] [35] However, modern predictive text and autocorrection algorithms largely mitigate the need to type them directly on such devices.

Alternating hands while typing is a desirable trait in a keyboard design. While one hand types a letter, the other hand can prepare to type the next letter, making the process faster and more efficient. In the QWERTY layout many more words can be spelled using only the left hand than the right hand. In fact, thousands of English words can be spelled using only the left hand, while only a couple of hundred words can be typed using only the right hand [10] (the three most frequent letters in the English language, E T A, are all typed with the left hand). In addition, more typing strokes are done with the left hand in the QWERTY layout. This is helpful for left- handed people but disadvantageous for right-handed people. The cedilla-versions of the characters do not exist in the Romanian language (they came to be used due to a historic bug). [40] The UCS now says that encoding this was a mistake because it messed up Romanian data and the letters with cedilla and the letters with comma are the same letter with a different style. [41]

These combinations are intended to be mnemonic and designed to be easy to remember: the circumflex accent (e.g. â) is similar to the free-standing circumflex (caret) ( The first model constructed by Sholes used a piano-like keyboard with two rows of characters arranged alphabetically as shown below: [1] - 3 5 7 9 N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z