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.

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. Two keyboard layout that are based on Qwerty are used in Arabic-speaking countries. Microsoft designate them as Arabic (101) and Arabic (102). 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.: Further information: British and American keyboards United Kingdom and Ireland (except Mac) keyboard layout United Kingdom Keyboard layout for Linux 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.

Free typing lessons, typing practice and typing tests.

The \ key on the right side of the keyboard is also the same. | could also be produced by shifting the key on the left side of the keyboard. " ? are produced by shifting the same keys, but ? is mirrored to ؟. On Arabic (102) it's true also for {} which are again mirrored. acute accents (e.g. á) needed for Irish are generated by pressing the AltGr key together with the letter (or AltGr+ '– acting as a dead key combination– followed by the letter). Thus AltGr+ a produces á; AltGr+ ⇧ Shift+ a produces Á. (Some programs use the combination of AltGr and a letter for other functions, in which case the AltGr+ ' method must be used to generate acute accents). From Windows XP SP2 onwards, Microsoft has included a variant of the British QWERTY keyboard (the "United Kingdom Extended" keyboard layout) that can additionally generate several diacritical marks. This supports input on a standard physical UK keyboard for many languages without changing positions of frequently used keys, which is useful when working with text in Welsh, Scots Gaelic and Irish — languages native to parts of the UK ( Wales, parts of Scotland and Northern Ireland respectively).

There are four Romanian-specific characters that are incorrectly implemented in versions of Microsoft Windows until Vista came out:The B00 key (left of Z), shifted, results in vertical bar | on some systems (e.g. Windows UK/Ireland keyboard layout and Linux/ X11 UK/Ireland keyboard layout), rather than the broken bar ¦ assigned by BS 4822 and provided in some systems (e.g. IBM OS/2 UK166 keyboard layout) The Icelandic keyboard layout is different from the standard QWERTY keyboard because the Icelandic alphabet has some special letters, most of which it shares with the other Nordic countries:

There is also an alternative keyboard layout called Norwegian with Sámi, which allows for easier input of the characters required to write various Sámi languages. All the Sámi characters are accessed through the AltGr key. In November 1868 he changed the arrangement of the latter half of the alphabet, N to Z, right-to-left. [3] :12–20 In April 1870 he arrived at a four-row, upper case keyboard approaching the modern QWERTY standard, moving six vowel letters, A, E, I, O, U, and Y, to the upper row as follows: [3] :24–25 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 -The QWERTY layout became popular with the success of the Remington No. 2 of 1878, the first typewriter to include both upper and lower case letters, using a ⇧ Shift key. The E00 key (left of 1) with AltGr provides either vertical bar | ( OS/2's UK166 keyboard layout, Linux/ X11 UK keyboard layout) or broken bar ¦ ( Microsoft Windows UK/Ireland keyboard layout) The following sections give general descriptions of QWERTY keyboard variants along with details specific to certain operating systems. The emphasis is on Microsoft Windows.