🇩🇪 QWERTZ keyboard layout

What QWERTZ is

QWERTZ is a family of keyboard and typewriter layouts in which the letter Z sits immediately to the right of T, in the position that the English QWERTY layout gives to Y. It is the standard layout in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Liechtenstein, and it is widely used in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Luxembourg and other parts of Central and South-Eastern Europe. The name is read straight off the keyboard: the first six keys of the top letter row spell Q-W-E-R-T-Z. Apart from the Y/Z swap, the most visible change versus QWERTY is that some symbol keys are replaced by language-specific letters such as Ä, Ö, Ü and ß. QWERTZ is not a single fixed layout but a base arrangement that each country adapts to its own language and diacritics. The underlying letter geometry is inherited from QWERTY, so the learning curve from one to the other is small.

Why Y and Z are swapped

The swap is a direct response to how German is actually written. In German the letter Z is common, while Y appears almost only in loanwords (mostly from Ancient Greek) and in proper names, so it makes sense to give the frequent letter the stronger central position and exile the rare one to the far edge. On mechanical typewriters there was a second, equally practical reason: the combination T followed by Z (the digraph "tz", as in Katze or Platz) is very frequent in German, and placing T and Z so they are struck by separate hands reduced the risk of the typebars jamming when the two were hit in quick succession. The arrangement also brings Z next to U, which makes the extremely common word and prefix "zu" (to / closed) easy to type. None of these reasons applies to English, where Z is one of the rarest letters, which is exactly why English keeps QWERTY. The swap is therefore not an accident of history but an optimization for the frequency and letter-pairing of German.

The umlauts ä ö ü and the sharp s ß as dedicated keys

Unlike workarounds that bury accented characters behind dead keys, the German QWERTZ layout gives the four extra letters their own physical keys, which is the single biggest reason the layout exists. The ö key sits immediately to the right of L, the ä key is directly to the right of ö, and the ü key sits to the right of P, so all three umlauts are reached as easily as ordinary letters and produce the lowercase form unshifted and the uppercase form (Ä, Ö, Ü) with Shift. The sharp s ß lives on the number row, to the right of the 0 key, and is typed with a single unshifted press. For a long time German had no everyday capital form of ß, but the modern standard adds the capital ẞ; current German keyboards typically produce it with the fixed combination Alt + Shift + H. Giving these letters real keys is what makes fluent German typing possible without dead-key gymnastics or memorized numeric codes. Switzerland is the notable exception: the Swiss layout has no ß key at all, because Swiss Standard German simply writes "ss" instead.

Other differences: Alt Gr, symbols and the number row

Because the umlauts and ß occupy space that QWERTY uses for punctuation and brackets, QWERTZ keyboards add a third level of characters reached with the Alt Gr key (the right-hand Alt). Holding Alt Gr and tapping a key produces a second-level symbol printed on the front or right of the keycap: @ is on Q (Alt Gr + Q), the Euro sign € is on E, and the micro sign µ is on M, while the brackets { [ ] }, the backslash, the pipe |, the tilde ~, and the superscripts ² and ³ are all Alt-Gr characters as well. This matters in practice because programmers and shell users on a German keyboard reach for Alt Gr constantly to type braces and the backslash. The number row carries the same digits as QWERTY but the shifted symbols above them are rearranged — for example the apostrophe, the question mark, the ampersand and the equals sign do not sit where an English typist expects. The accent keys ^, ´ and ` are dead keys: you press and release one, then press a letter, to build characters like ô, á or ù.

Variants of QWERTZ

QWERTZ is a base that each country tailors, so "one QWERTZ keyboard" does not exist. The German T1 layout is the reference, standardized in DIN 2137 (the basic layout is called T1 in DIN 2137-1:2012-06; the older extended T2 and T3 layouts were later replaced by the E1 and E2 layouts in the 2018 edition). The Austrian layout is for practical purposes the same as the German one. The Swiss layout is bilingual by design: a single physical keyboard serves both Swiss German and Swiss French, the difference living only in the software driver — the German setting makes ä, ö, ü available unshifted, while the French setting puts é, à, è unshifted; it has no ß. The Hungarian layout is the most distinctive, moving the 0 (zero) to the left of the 1 so that the many Hungarian accented letters can be grouped together on the right side. The Czech layout adds letters such as č and ř for Czech, with Alt Gr giving back the ASCII symbols, and the Slovak layout is close to the Czech one. Slovenian, Croatian and other former-Yugoslav layouts follow the same QWERTZ base with their own diacritics.

History and spread

QWERTZ grew out of QWERTY, the layout patented by Christopher Latham Sholes in the 1870s and made famous by the Remington typewriter. As typewriters reached the German market around the turn of the twentieth century, manufacturers adapted the familiar English arrangement to German needs by swapping Y and Z and adding keys for ä, ö, ü and ß; German firms were producing typewriters with these characters in the early 1900s. The layout then spread with German technological, economic and cultural influence across Central Europe and the lands of the former Austria-Hungary, which is why so many neighbouring countries adopted a QWERTZ base rather than QWERTY. Germany later formalized the arrangement in the national standard DIN 2137. Today QWERTZ is the everyday layout in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Liechtenstein and is common in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia and Luxembourg. The swap that began as a fix for typewriter mechanics and German letter frequency has long outlived the machines it was designed for.

How to touch-type on QWERTZ

Touch typing on QWERTZ rests on the same home row as QWERTY — left fingers on A S D F, right fingers on J K L and the key after it — so a QWERTY typist already knows most of the muscle memory and mainly has to relearn three things. First, retrain the Y/Z swap: the right index reaches up for Z where it used to hit Y, and the left index now finds Y at the far edge, which is the change that trips people up most at first. Second, build a reflex for the umlaut keys to the right of L and P and the ß after 0, practising them in real words like schön, über, Mädchen and groß until they feel as automatic as any vowel. Third, train the Alt Gr hand for @, € and the brackets, since reaching that third level smoothly is what separates fluent German typing from constant glancing down. TypeRIGHTing supports national layouts directly — you can switch to QWERTZ and practise the special letters ä, ö, ü, ß in context, so you learn the layout the way you will actually use it.

FAQ