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EVERY LANGUAGE

Touch typing in 86 languages

Each language has its own lessons, speed test and games, with a keyboard guide that shows the physical key and the character it produces. Grouped below by writing system — 24 of them, from Latin to Devanagari to Han.

Latin 47 languages

The most widely used alphabet in the world, and the one your keyboard is built around. More on typing Latin →

Cyrillic 8 languages

Developed in the ninth century and now used across Eastern Europe and much of Central Asia. More on typing Cyrillic → · Typing Cyrillic: one script, eight keyboards

Arabic 5 languages

Written right to left, with letters that change shape depending on whether they start, sit inside, or end a word — and most of them join to the letter after. More on typing Arabic → · Typing the Arabic script: one alphabet, five keyboards

Devanagari 3 languages

An abugida, where each consonant carries an inherent vowel that other marks replace. More on typing Devanagari → · Hindi typing: InScript, Mangal and Kruti Dev

Bengali 2 languages

Closely related to Devanagari and just as much an abugida, with a distinctive headline running along the top of most letters. More on typing Bengali → · InScript: how one layout covers eight Indian scripts

Ethiopic 2 languages

An abugida — and the one the word is named after, from the Ge'ez letters a-bu-gi-da. More on typing Ethiopic → · Typing Amharic and Tigrinya: a syllable at a time

Han 2 languages

Logographic: each character represents a word or a meaningful part of one, and there are tens of thousands. More on typing Han →

Armenian 1 language

Created around 405 AD and unrelated to any neighbouring script, with 39 letters written left to right. More on typing Armenian → · Typing Georgian and Armenian: two alphabets you can nearly guess

Georgian 1 language

Around 1,600 years old, unrelated to anything else, and — unusually — it has no capital letters at all. More on typing Georgian → · Typing Georgian and Armenian: two alphabets you can nearly guess

Greek 1 language

The ancestor of both Latin and Cyrillic, in continuous use for around three thousand years. More on typing Greek → · Typing Greek: a layout you can half-guess

Gujarati 1 language

Derived from Devanagari and immediately distinguishable from it by what is missing: the horizontal line along the top of the letters. More on typing Gujarati → · InScript: how one layout covers eight Indian scripts

Gurmukhi 1 language

Standardised in the sixteenth century by Guru Angad and used for Sikh scripture and for Punjabi in India. More on typing Gurmukhi → · InScript: how one layout covers eight Indian scripts

Hangul 1 language

Designed from scratch in the fifteenth century, and it shows: letters are shaped to reflect how they are pronounced, and they assemble into square syllable blocks as you type. More on typing Hangul →

Hebrew 1 language

Written right to left, with no vowels in ordinary text — readers supply them from context, and the dots that mark them are used only in dictionaries, poetry and scripture. More on typing Hebrew → · Typing Hebrew: five final letters and no vowels

Kannada 1 language

Telugu's sibling, slightly more angular and sharing an ancestor with it. More on typing Kannada → · InScript: how one layout covers eight Indian scripts

Khmer 1 language

Holder of the record for the largest alphabet — around 74 characters between the consonants, dependent and independent vowels and diacritics. More on typing Khmer → · Typing Khmer and Lao: the largest alphabet, and a simplified one

Lao 1 language

Closely related to Thai and simpler, because Lao underwent a spelling reform that Thai did not: words are written broadly as they sound, where Thai keeps etymological spellings from Sanskrit and Pali. More on typing Lao → · Typing Khmer and Lao: the largest alphabet, and a simplified one

Malayalam 1 language

One of the larger Indic character inventories, historically including several hundred ligature forms for consonant clusters. More on typing Malayalam → · InScript: how one layout covers eight Indian scripts

Myanmar 1 language

A rounded abugida written without spaces between words, whose recent history is dominated by an encoding problem rather than a linguistic one. More on typing Myanmar → · Typing Burmese: Zawgyi, Unicode, and a decade of broken text

Odia 1 language

Distinguished by the curved line running across the top of most letters — an adaptation, like Sinhala's rounded shapes, usually attributed to writing on palm leaves, where a straight horizontal stroke risked tearing along the grain. More on typing Odia → · InScript: how one layout covers eight Indian scripts

Sinhala 1 language

Written in rounded letterforms with almost no straight lines at all — the usual explanation being palm-leaf manuscripts, whose grain a straight stroke could split. More on typing Sinhala → · Typing Sinhala: Wijesekara, and an alphabet in two halves

Tamil 1 language

Among the oldest continuously written languages in the world, with inscriptions going back more than two thousand years. More on typing Tamil → · Typing Tamil: the layout that did not join InScript

Telugu 1 language

A rounded script closely related to Kannada; the two were a single script until roughly the fifteenth century and remain similar enough that readers of one can often puzzle out the other. More on typing Telugu → · InScript: how one layout covers eight Indian scripts

Thai 1 language

Forty-four consonants, around 28 vowel forms and four tone marks, written without spaces between words — spaces mark the ends of clauses instead, which makes working out where one word ends a job for the reader and a well-known hard problem for software. More on typing Thai → · Typing Thai: four levels, and no spaces between words

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