Language Keyboards
Pick your language or layout to test every key in your browser, see which special characters to check and learn how to add the keyboard to Windows or Mac. Not sure it works at all? Start with the keyboard tester.
There are 71 keyboards below, grouped by region. Each one shows the keyboard tester labelled with that layout, so you can see which character every key should type, plus the special keys to check and the steps to install the layout on Windows or a Mac.
The tester reads the physical key you press, not the letter your computer types. That means it can tell a broken key apart from a keyboard set to the wrong language: if a key lights up but the wrong letter appears in your documents, the key is fine and the layout setting on your computer needs changing.
Keyboards with full guides
These pages include a detailed guide to the layout: where the special characters are, how Alt Gr and dead keys work, and fixes for the most common problems.
Middle East and Central Asia
Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, Pashto, Sindhi, Uyghur and Gilaki are all written in the Arabic script from right to left, and Hebrew is right to left too. Their layouts put a different letter on almost every key, so a single wrong setting shows up as gibberish. Turkish, Azerbaijani and Uzbek use the Latin alphabet with extra letters such as ğ, ş and ı, Kazakh uses Cyrillic, and Armenian and Georgian have alphabets of their own with dedicated layouts.
South Asia
Hindi, Marathi and Nepali are written in Devanagari, and Bengali, Assamese, Gujarati, Punjabi (Gurmukhi), Odia, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Sinhala each have their own script. Windows uses the InScript layout for most Indian languages, where vowels sit on the left of the keyboard and consonants on the right, and conjunct letters are built with the virama (halant) key. Most keyboards sold in the region are printed in English only, so testing helps you learn where each letter lives.
East and Southeast Asia
Chinese, Japanese and Korean are typed through an input method (IME): you press keys on a normal keyboard and the IME turns them into characters. Japanese JIS keyboards add keys such as Henkan, Muhenkan and Kana, and Korean keyboards add Han/Yeong and Hanja keys. Thai uses the Kedmanee layout, Vietnamese is usually typed with the Telex or VNI method on a QWERTY keyboard, and Indonesian and Filipino use the standard US layout.
Europe
European layouts fall into a few families. German, Czech, Hungarian, Croatian and Slovak use QWERTZ, with Y and Z swapped. French uses AZERTY. Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and the Nordic layouts keep QWERTY but add letters such as ñ, à, ç, å and ø. Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian and Bulgarian use Cyrillic layouts, and Greek has its own. Most European keyboards also have the ISO shape, with an extra key next to the left Shift and a tall Enter key, and an Alt Gr key for third characters.
- Belarusian keyboard
- Bulgarian keyboard
- Croatian keyboard
- Czech keyboard
- Danish keyboard
- Dutch keyboard
- Finnish keyboard
- French keyboard
- German keyboard
- Greek keyboard
- Hungarian keyboard
- Italian keyboard
- Norwegian keyboard
- Polish keyboard
- Portuguese keyboard
- Romanian keyboard
- Russian keyboard
- Serbian keyboard
- Slovak keyboard
- Spanish keyboard
- Swedish keyboard
- Ukrainian keyboard
Africa
Swahili, Hausa and Yoruba are written in the Latin alphabet, but Hausa needs hooked letters such as ɓ, ɗ and ƙ and Yoruba needs tone marks and dotted letters such as ẹ, ọ and ṣ, which the Nigerian layouts add. Amharic is written in the Ge’ez script and is usually typed phonetically: you type the sound in Latin letters and the input method turns it into the matching syllable.
Layouts and regional variants
Some keyboards share a language but differ in detail. The UK layout moves @ and " and adds £, the Brazilian ABNT2 layout adds ç and an extra key, and the Latin American, Canadian French, Belgian and Swiss German layouts differ from their European cousins. US International adds dead keys for accents on a US keyboard. Dvorak and Colemak rearrange the letters for comfort and speed rather than for a language.
How to test a language keyboard
- Open the page for your language and click the keyboard on screen.
- Press every key once. Working keys light up and stay tinted, and the counter shows how many you have tested.
- Press the keys that only your language has, then try them with Shift and Alt Gr, since many characters need a combination.
- Switch the tester to Mac or ISO if your keyboard has Command keys or an extra key next to the left Shift.
- If a key never lights up, read why a keyboard stops working. If it lights up but types the wrong character, add the right layout using the steps on the page.