Keyboards and Languages
Mac Tip#63/14-July-2002

Dead Keys, MacTip #62, covered typing characters such as an umlaut or an acute, but it worked from the assumption that we were using an English language keyboard.

Many years ago I studied German and then in the mid-70s lived in Dusseldorf, Germany, for a year. When I came home I brought a German typewriter with me, which was very handy for typing up resource sheets for the German languages classes I was teaching.

The German typewriter was different from an English typewriter in two ways: it had keys for umlauts etc, but it also had a slightly different keyboard layout. I no longer recall the details but I do remember that the y and the z had switched places.

Similarly, other languages have keyboards laid out differently from the English keyboard and your Mac can easily cater for this. Suppose you regularly correspond in Spanish, although generally you write in English and you have an English keyboard.

If you use OS X go to the System Preferences and choose the International pane, then click on Keyboard Menu. Scroll down and put a check in the box beside Spanish.

A new item appears in your menu bar: a flag for the country whose keyboard you’re currently using. For me, that’s the Australian keyboard.

To type extended amounts of Spanish click on the flag and drag down to the Spanish flag. Now if you type Shift and the 1 key you’ll see an inverted exclamation mark, while Shift-2 gets a regular exclamation mark.

Other keys will also type different characters — the characters you’d get if it really were a Spanish keyboard.

You can do the same thing under earlier versions of the Mac OS. Look under Control Panels for the Keyboard Control Panel.

And if you need to learn which keys will type which characters then use the KeyCaps utility covered in Dead Keys, MacTip #62.