How to write French accents with a QWERTY keyboard

Written byAnne-Claire Bocageon 18 August 2009

You might be confronted with this problem if you bought your PC in the States and are using it to write some French. Well, I found an easy technique to type French accents and I’d like to share it with you!

Go under Start > Control Panel > Regional and Language Options
When the new window pops up, select the 3^rd tab: 'Keyboards and Languages'
Click on 'Change keyboards'¦'
You should now see listed your keyboard languages.
Add the following language: 'United States-International'.

I advise you to remove your previous language as it can be a pain to switch from one keyboard to another, and it sometimes does do this while typing. Very irritating'¦. Or you can leave it as it is and come back later. Just make sure 'United States-International' is now on top of the keyboard list (using the 'move up' button).

Open now a blank email or Word document to try it out.

If you wish to write a word with 'é', type your accent first ' ' ' followed by 'e'

Here are a summary for most common accents and tricky French letters:

' + e = é
` + e = è
^ + e = ê
^ + u = û
' + c = ç
` + a = à
' + o = ö
' + i = ï

One thing you will notice now that you have switched to the United States-International keyboard is some of your actions need to be followed by the space bar to become effective. For instance this is the case with apostrophes. If you'd like to cite something, you need to type on the apostrophe symbol and then the space bar to make it appear.

This can seem a bit complicated at first, but I can assure you it all becomes automatic and efficient after a short while.

I wish you inspiration to write great French texts now that you know how to type them!

We do our best to provide accurate and up to date information. However, if you have noticed any inaccuracies in this article, please let us know in the comments section below.

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Comments

Steven201410 years ago(Modified)
Why it has to be so difficult to type those French accents? Alt keys, Ctrl keys... Codes, Symbols... So annoying! I gave up on all those so called 'methods' promoted by french.about.com. They're just useless. I use http://french.typeit.org and http://www.typefrench.org, both are free and very easy to use. You can google 'type french accents' , you'll see also few others as simple.

samh10 years ago(Modified)
I’m French and take correct spelling seriously, but I use a standard US qwerty keyboard (not the international version). While I’d appreciate the intuitiveness of using ' e for “é”, the fact that the ' key will no longer work as before is too annoying, especially when I switch back to English. The solution for me was to use a “Compose key”. Basically, it’s a key on your keyboard (one you may not use often, for instance the Right Alt key) that you press to say “the next keys I’m going to press are meant to be composed together”. So for instance Compose ' e will give “é”, Compose , C will give “Ç”, etc. There are hundreds of composition rules, for instance the Euro symbol € is done with Compose C =. You can also make « French quotes » using Compose < < and Compose > >. The œ used in the words « œil » or « bœuf » is simply done using Compose o e. The compose key is standard on Linux, but on Windows I had to write a program to get it (I hope others might find it useful: https://github.com/SamHocevar/wincompose).

1Mimi11 years ago(Modified)
Check TypeFrench.org It\'s an online French keyboard and it\'s free. Very simple. You press the same key twice or 3 times to get the French accent. I type my text in the box, then I copy and paste it elsewhere.

How to write French accents with a QWERTY keyboard

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