This is very annoying if you have to enter a text with these characters: you have to switch the layout after each word. And we have no possibility to enter some characters such as, , #, & in Russian layout at all. When entering Russian text we have to use Shift key to enter such usual character as comma. American keyboard standard also has smaller number of keys so that dot, comma, question sign and other punctuation are located in different places in Russian in English layouts. These keys were never intended for layout switching. So now we have to press two keys (usually Alt+Shift simultaniously) to switch the layout (or those who uses Linux can employ Caps Lock for that). Unfortunately, in mid-1990s we saw dramatic spread of the American standard of computers, whose keyboard has no features to support languages other than English. For example, this is a keyboard of Yamaha computer from the mid-80s (it was the first computer model I ever used): They also had more alphabet keys so that it was possible to put the punctuation in Russian layout at the same places as in Latin layout. Most of them had both Latin and Cyrillic characters printed on the keys.)įormerly computers had a special key 'РУС' so that the layout could be switched. (Well, not necessarily your standard QWERTY as you'd find in the UK or US. Not that this is the method of the majority or completely correct, but that's just what I witnessed. How is it done?All of the keyboards that I saw when I was over there were standard QWERTY keyboards and the people used the same method you described above (ALT+SHIFT or clicking on the language bar) to switch between languages. I mean, if you have a standard Cyrillic keyboard and no other parallell keyboard installed, you still need to type URLs with Latin letters, or if you happen to need to go into the command prompt or write forumlas in Excel or something like that. I don't mean techie geeks who wor in the IT industry, like myself and several others here, who have parallel English and other keyboard layouts installed as part of Windows, and swap with a a keystroke.

I am just curious about how people in Russia and elsewhere normally handle this.

Punto switcher phonetic alphabet