4.5.1 Computer keyboards

In the early days of computers it was possible to buy a range of keyboards, each suited to typing at speed in different languages. One now remains – the QWERTYUIOP keyboard – which was designed to enhance typing in English (Granville et al., 1998). It is of course possible to install software to enable faster keyboarding in other languages, and plastic templates can be laid over QWERTYUIOP keyboards to rearrange the letters to suit other languages. But the ‘English’ keyboard is now ‘normal’, and anything else is in some way derived or adapted from it. This dominance of keyboards designed to work well for the English language could therefore be seen as a potential contributing factor in the growing dominance of English and the concurrent decline of endangered minority languages.