Typing Turkish: two national layouts and two letter i's

Two national layouts, and the one that won

Turkey is unusual in having a keyboard layout designed for its own language and a second one that everybody actually uses.

The F-keyboard was developed in the 1950s from an analysis of Turkish letter frequency. It balances the load between the hands more evenly than QWERTY manages for any language, it became a Turkish standard in 1974, and Turkish speed-typing records are set on it. By the usual measures it is simply a better keyboard for Turkish.

The Q-keyboard is QWERTY with the Turkish letters added, and it is what is sold, what is installed, and what these lessons teach. The F-keyboard's advantage was real and arrived after QWERTY typewriters were already in every Turkish office, which is the whole story. A layout designed after a standard is established has to be enough better to overcome every keyboard already in the world, and none has ever been.

The practical consequence is that you learn the Q-keyboard unless you have a specific reason not to — and if you are typing Turkish on somebody else's machine, that decision has already been made for you.

Six letters that QWERTY does not have

The Q-keyboard's job is to find room for six characters English does not use. They are not decorations on Latin letters: each is a letter of the Turkish alphabet in its own right, with its own place in the alphabet and its own sound.

The table counts how often each one turns up in the Turkish practice words here, and which other languages on this site need the same character. That second column is the useful one if you already type another language — the letters you already have a key for are the ones you will not have to think about.

The two letter i's

Turkish has a dotted i and a dotless ı, and they are separate letters. This is not a typographic variant or an accent. They are as different as o and u, and swapping one for the other is a spelling mistake that changes the word.

The part that surprises people is what happens in capitals. The capital of dotless ı is I, and the capital of dotted i is İ — a capital I with a dot on it. English's single i/I pair splits into two pairs, which means the keyboard has two keys where English has one, and text that is uppercased or lowercased by software has to know it is Turkish before it can do it correctly.

That last point has made the dotless i the most famous case-conversion trap in software. Uppercase "i" and an English-speaking program gives you "I", which in Turkish is the capital of a different letter. It has broken file formats, login systems and search for decades, and it is worth knowing about even if you never write a line of code — because it explains why your Turkish text sometimes comes back subtly wrong from a system that was not expecting it.

At the keyboard it is much simpler than it sounds. There are two keys, you learn which is which, and after a week the distinction is no more effortful than telling m from n.

What transfers if you already touch type

Nearly everything. The Q-keyboard is QWERTY underneath, so the home row, the finger assignments and every letter you already know are exactly where you left them. This is the easiest transition on this site — far easier than a new script, and easier than French or German, which move letters you already use.

What you are adding is six keys around the edges of the letter block and one distinction to think about. The keys are ordinary reaches; the distinction is the ı and the i, and that is a habit rather than a skill.

The one thing worth practising deliberately is not letting your English fingers autocomplete a Turkish word. A word that looks nearly English invites the hands to finish it the English way, and the correction costs more than the keystroke would have.