How to Type Foreign Language Characters with an American Keyboard

Last Updated: February 22, 2022

If you need to type in Western European languages besides English, you will need to produce special characters and diacritics. Some familiar examples are German umlauts (ü) and eszett or sharp S (ß), the cedilla (ç) in French and Portuguese, the tilde (ñ) in Spanish, and accents (ó, à, ê) and ligatures (æ) in general. Here is a tutorial that will help you to configure your American keyboard to type these additional characters quickly and conveniently, under Windows.

Method 1

Method 1 of 3:

Using the Control Panel

1
Go to the Control Panel and click on Regional and Language Options.
2
Click the Language tab, and under text services, click "details". This will open another window with the list of installed and available languages.

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3
If you wish, remove the English US keyboard from the list. Highlight it in the list and click Remove. Alternatively, you can have multiple keyboards installed at once. (For instance, the configuration shown includes Greek and Dvorak keyboards.) For multiple keyboards, you may select the default keyboard of your choice. You may also wish to define a keystroke to switch between the selected keyboards.
4
If you want to add another language, click the add button.
5
Pick the first thing as English (USA). Click on the second one below it and find United States (International).
6
Click OK, and OK and you have it! This is now your keyboard:
7
To use this keyboard, notice that it is similar, with a few differences. For example, when you push the [`] button (next to the one) it just makes a backtick [`]. However, if you press [`] and then a vowel (for example o) it will produce ò. Typing
- [`] and [o] makes ò
- ['] and [o] makes ó
8
Find more options by pressing SHIFT:
- The [~],[^], and ["] also function as accent keys.
- [~] and [o] makes õ (~ is also used for Spanish ñ or Portuguese ã)
- [^] and [o] makes ô
- ["] and [o] makes ö
9
Learn to use Alt-Gr. On this keyboard layout, Alt-Gr this takes the place of the Alt key on the right side. Alt is short for "alternative". Press it to get the following keyboard layout:
- The alternative characters include:
  ¡ ² ³ ¤ € ¼ ½ ‘ ’ ¥ ×
  ä å é ® þ ü ú í ó ö « »
  á ß ð ø æ © ñ µ ç ¿
10
Optional: If you still want to do other Unicode characters like ţ, ş, ă, ą, ł, or ☏, ☼, ♂, etc. Install the free software JLG Extended Keyboard Layout then redo the steps above, except that instead of choosing the US International keyboard layout, you choose the US (JLGv11) keyboard. More than 1000 Unicode character are made available in this layer.

Method 2

Method 2 of 3:

Using a Character Map

1
Go to the Start menu. If you are running Windows Vista, type in "charmap" on the search line. If you are running an earlier version of Windows, click on "Run" and in the text box, type "charmap". Enter.
2
A pop-up window ("Character Map" applet) will show, with a typeface and font size listed, and a scrolling grid of boxes -- each with one character -- below. Scroll until you find the character you want. Click on the character. Press <Ctrl>-C to copy, or double-click it to add it to the text box below the grid, and then click "copy". Go to whatever program you were typing in, and press <Ctrl>-V to paste.
3
When finished, close the Character Map window.

Method 3

Method 3 of 3:

Using ALT Codes

1
Most Western European characters lie within the 256-character ANSI character set.
- In Character Map (see above), if you click on an accented character, such as é, you will see a code (in this example, "Alt+0233").
2
To type this character directly: Make sure the NumLock on your keyboard is on. Hold down the left Alt key without releasing it until you have typed in the four-digit code beginning with "0". (In the case of é, that would be "0233".)
3
If you switch frequently between languages, or need just a few accented characters, this can be a faster method than swapping code pages.

Community Q&A

Question

How can I input Alt codes on iPad?

NSA

Community Answer

Using apps from the app store will allow you to access a greater variety of characters.
Question

How do I do a 0 with a forward slash in it?

Adri Anziano

Community Answer

On programs like Word and Google Docs, you can find these symbols in the "Special Characters" menu.
Question

Your instructions (at least for the first method - using Control Panel) are not correlating to what I have in Windows 10 when I go into Control Panel. I'm getting no "Regional and Language Options.”

Community Answer

You can click on “Time & Language”, click on “Region and Language”, click on “add a language”, type in the language you want and click on it, click the checkbox if you want it to be the default display language (blue for yes; empty for no), then download the keyboard.

Warnings

Some languages still don't have very good software support. Asian languages (Chinese, Korean, etc.) and Indian languages typically require certain fonts to be installed.

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Right-to-left languages, such as Hebrew and Arabic, may display poorly in some circumstances, and may not coexist well in the same page or document as left-to-right languages.

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