Type Accents

Typing French accents
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Writing in French

It’s just as important to include accents when writing in French as it is to spell words correctly. It drives me kind of crazy when people say, sorry, I can’t type accents on my computer / tablet / smartphone. Yes, you can type accents – yes! even on your old computer. No, you don’t have to buy a French keyboard, or install any software.

Virtually every system has at least one built-in method for typing accents – follow these links to find out what it is and how to activate it.

How to type French accents in / on

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French accents

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4 Responses

  1. Mitchell Weinberg 11 January 2018 / 23:10

    Am I reading this correct that it is not possible to type the oe ligature using a Windows laptop (outside of a word processing program)?

    • lkl 12 January 2018 / 6:27

      In terms of the international keyboard and ALT codes: yes, that’s correct, as far as I know. My solution is to use one of those programs that allow you to create shortcuts for text snippets (like Clavier++ or KeyText) – mine is set to type Å“ for ctrl + o.

  2. Russell Collins 5 November 2016 / 4:22

    So how do you type accents on laptops????

    • lkl 5 November 2016 / 7:16

      It depends on your OS. If you use Windows, you can’t use ALT codes, so you need to use the International Keyboard – click the link “Windows: regular user.” Otherwise, click the Mac or Linux link for instructions.

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