[LINK] "Is France's unloved AZERTY keyboard heading for the scrapheap?"

[rfmcdonald]

The BBC News' Hugh Schofield notes the belated decline of France's AZERTY keyboard.

France's 100 year-old AZERTY keyboard - the equivalent of the English-language QWERTY - is to be reconfigured after the government ruled that it encourages bad writing.

The AZERTY set-up has infuriated generations of writers, because of labour-creating peculiarities like the need for two strokes to make full-stops and numerals.

But official ire is directed less at such inconveniences, and more at certain quirks and oversights which, it says, make it hard to construct proper French.

"Today it is practically impossible to write French correctly using a keyboard that has been bought in France," the ministry intones.

"More surprisingly, certain European countries like Germany and Spain respect French writing better than the French are able to - because their keyboards permit it!"

The culture ministry has commissioned Paris-based consultancy AFNOR to draw up a list of recommendations by the summer.

The aim is to produce a new standard keyboard that will gradually replace the many varieties of AZERTY currently on the market.