Thread: How do Russians and others normally switch between Latin and non-Latin keyboards?

Originally Posted by Hanna

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

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. But regular, non technical people.

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. 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. Not that this is the method of the majority or completely correct, but that's just what I witnessed.

(Well, not necessarily your standard QWERTY as you'd find in the UK or US. Most of them had both Latin and Cyrillic characters printed on the keys.)