LAST YEAR A NEWS PHOTOGRAPH showed Jacques Chirac, the president of France, greeting George W. Bush on his arrival in Evian with the same degree of enthusiasm that usually accompanies “Welcome to Burger King.” While recent events have exacerbated tensions, such coolness has a long history between two proud countries that have always insisted on going their own way—and not just in world affairs. In fact, while researching an article about typewriters for a recent issue, we learned that the French sense of exceptionalism extends even to their keyboards.
Most of the world’s Roman-alphabet typists get by with the standard QWERTY layout, with occasional mild quirks: In Germany, for example, the Zand fare switched. While these differences, and special keys for accents and the like, can create inconvenience (in 1997 the European Commission released a 25-page “Recommendation for the Placement of the Euro Sign on Computer Keyboards”), most users of one keyboard can adapt fairly readily to a different one.
In France and many Francophone countries, however, a much different keyboard is used, with half a dozen letters out of place. The layout, which by some accounts was devised to get around a patent on QWERTY, is AZERTYUIOP/QSDFGHJKLM/WXCVBN. The French keyboard is also notable for requiring users to depress the shift key to type numerals. This nonconformity has held steady for nearly a century, through two world wars and the pressures of globalization.
Why do the French have their own keyboard? The short answer is: Because they’re French. In fact, as the scholar Delphine Gardey has written, the original “French keyboard” was a much more radical affair, with a top line of ZHJAYSCPG. In typical Gallic fashion, this layout was designed in 1907 by a commission of experts who were charged with finding a rational solution to the keyboard question. By contrast, the German QWERTZ keyboard was mandated by a 1928 government edict, while QWERTY developed in the customary American way—an unregulated free-for-all, and whoever has the biggest company wins.
Alas for the French, when World War I came, their typing superiority counted for little. The war destroyed French industry, and the nation’s typists had to rely on imports from other countries, which indulged them to the extent of AZERTY but rejected any wilder variations. So ZHJAYSCPG was gone, but AZERTY lived on. Decades later, James Thurber recalled his days as a newspaperman in 1920s Paris: “We all had French keyboards, and if you wrote fast enough and fell into the American style, everything turned out in commas and parentheses and other punctuation marks.”
Ever since, France has clung to its anomalous layout, causing no end of inconvenience for French speakers and nonspeakers alike. Is it really more efficient? No one knows. The real lesson is that sometimes a single workable standard is better than a varied collection of optimum solutions.
