The latest campaign to protect the French language isn't being waged over anglicisms like "hashtag" or "selfie," but the design of a keyboard.

This week, the French government announced a plan to standardize the French-language computer keyboard, as part of an effort to help protect and nurture the language. The ministry of culture and communication says it's "nearly impossible to correctly write French" on keyboards sold in the country today, meaning that the language's strict grammatical rules are being flouted more regularly. The ministry has partnered with a standardization group to develop a new keyboard norm, which will be presented for public feedback this summer.

Unlike the QWERTY keyboards on most devices in the US and Europe, French-language keyboards follow an AZERTY layout, and they've never been standardized. That means that the layout can vary from one manufacturer to another, making it difficult for users to locate important keys or accented characters.

Interne or Interné?

The placement of the "@" and "€" keys, for example, is inconsistent across French keyboards, and accenting capitalized letters can be particularly difficult, requiring commands that aren't obvious to many users — or, in the case of the "Ç" character on PCs, impossible. That's a problem, considering that "Ça" ("that") is commonly used at the beginning of sentences, and that surnames are often written in all-uppercase on government documents. It can also lead to confusion; an example cited by the ministry compares "INTERNE" (a medical intern) to "INTERNÉ" (a mental health patient).

"We can only deplore the fact that the use of accents on capitalized letters is variable," the Académie Française, the official guardian of the French language, says on its website, in a statement cited in the ministry report. "[I]t should be noted that in French, the accent has full orthographic value," it added, emphasizing its importance.

The Académie Française has spent the better part of 300 years protecting the integrity of the French language — more recently, by defending it from anglicisms like "cloud computing" and "le cheeseburger." (The notoriously stodgy institution calls its 40 panel members "Immortals," and set an upper age limit of 75 in 2010.) And although the number of French speakers is rising across the globe, there are concerns over the future of the language within France. Recent surveys have shown an increase in spelling errors among French students, and there has been some debate over whether text messages and other forms of online communication bear some of the blame.



Once adopted, the new keyboard standard would be voluntary for keyboard manufacturers, though in a report outlining its position, the culture and communication ministry said that it could be required for public administration computers, which would incentivize companies to follow suit. AFNOR, the standardization group charged with developing the new keyboard, has said that the process is open to all who want to participate.

Left: France's current AZERTY layout. Right: the BÉPO open source alternative.

Some have already taken matters into their own hands. In recent years, a community of advocates for open-source software developed BÉPO, a keyboard layout that was cited as an example in the ministry report. BÉPO is based on the Dvorak layout, which was developed in the 1930s as a more ergonomic alternative to QWERTY, and is designed specifically for the French language. Some accented characters have their own key, and ligatures like æ and œ can be executed with a simple shortcut. Its developers say the layout was based on a statistical study of the French language, with the most commonly used letters placed on the "home row," where a user's fingers would naturally rest.

"The fact that the government is talking about BÉPO is a very good sign," says Frédéric Urbain, a BÉPO user and member of Framasoft, a French organization that promotes the use of open-source software. Urbain, 48, began using BÉPO about a year ago, and although it's taken some time to get used to, he says it's far more intuitive than the AZERTY keyboards he's forced to use at his finance job. "I don't find it practical at all," he says of his AZERTY keyboard. "Everyone like me will welcome this initiative from the government, which has finally recognized that the French language, with all of its specificity, is not adapted to an international keyboard like AZERTY."

But the government's ambitions go beyond the French language. In its statement, the ministry said the layout should allow for regional languages including Breton, Occitan, Catalan, and those used in Polynesia, each requiring accented characters that don't appear in French. It should also allow users to "more easily enter" Latin characters used in other European languages.

"We want something that's usable, something that's economically feasible."

"It seems essential that this keyboard allows for the easy use of not only French, but also different languages present in our land, because these languages have specifics that should be taken into account," the ministry said. "Indeed, in a highly multilingual context, it is now necessary to use several languages on the same document or project."

It's not clear whether the government will adopt a standard that, like BÉPO, drastically diverges from AZERTY. In a press release this week, AFNOR said the new standard would not "disrupt" the current layout, though Philippe Magnabosco, the project manager charged with overseeing the development, says the organization is "not going to close the door for innovation." He says the group will consult with keyboard makers, programmers, and users on the proposal to be presented this summer, and that it will be open to proposals that either modify the existing layout with added keys, or more alternative designs that meet minimum requirements.

"We're not working in an ideal world here — we're making standards for them to be applied in the real world," Magnabosco says. "So we're not going to look at something that would revolutionize the keyboard completely. We want something that's usable, something that's economically feasible. We want it to work."