Windows 11 Keyboard Layout Settings, Explained by Someone Who Hates the New UI

The Windows 11 keyboard layout takes under a minute to set. The fast route goes through Language options, and the steps are listed below. Switching between layouts you already have is quicker still. Press Win+Space, and it takes half a second.

The rest of this page is for people with a stubborn layout.

• Why the layout keeps un-setting itself.
• Forcing a default that sticks.
• The registry fix for when Settings doesn’t tell the truth.

The paths below come from 24H2, and the same ones apply on 25H2. Nothing here is brand new.

Every step works on 22H2 and later. Microsoft rearranged the Settings pages and never told anyone where the options went.

And yes, we still don’t like the new interface.

Layout and display language: two separate settings

A keyboard layout maps keys to characters. It decides which character appears when you press a key.

• QWERTY
• AZERTY
• QWERTZ
• DVORAK

The display language only sets menus, dialogs and messages. So the system can run in Japanese while you type in English, or the other way round.

This mix-up comes up again and again on r/Windows11. Someone sets the display language to German and expects the keys to type German.

Then the emails come out garbled. A ß at the end of every sentence is the classic sign.

Display language is interface text. Keyboard layout is what comes out when you hit a key.

Neither knows the other exists. If you want the language of the system itself, our page on changing the language in Windows 11 covers that job.

It works the same on every edition. Home vs Pro differs on plenty of things, but not on keyboard input.

How to add a Windows 11 keyboard layout

A layout you add is active immediately. There’s no restart and no sign-out, and it shows up in the taskbar switcher.

A typical case: a laptop ordered online arrives as a German model by mistake. The Y and Z keys are swapped.

Or you moved countries, and the Spanish keyboard you bought no longer fits. The fix is the same either way.

1. Press Win+I to open Settings.
2. In the sidebar, select Time & language. In the right pane, select Language & region.
3. Find your language under Preferred languages and select the three dots next to it.
4. Choose Language options.
5. Scroll past the speech and handwriting entries to Keyboards, and select Add a keyboard.
6. Pick the layout from the list.

Thirty seconds later it’s in the taskbar.

If the layout you want isn’t in the list, the language pack isn’t installed. Go back to Language & region and select Add a language.

Search for it and install it. We’d untick the speech and handwriting boxes before selecting Install.

Otherwise it pulls a couple of hundred megabytes you don’t need. Then come back and add the keyboard.

Want the menus to stay as they are? Leave “Set as my Windows display language” unticked while adding it. The language then sits in your list, its keyboards appear under Language options, and nothing else changes. No sign-out either. English menus with two or three layouts is a setup plenty of multilingual users run, and so would we.

Language packs download through Windows Update. If the download fails on a fresh install, we’d check two things before blaming the pack. Windows Update has to work, and the PC has to be activated with a valid Windows 11 license.

Switching between Windows 11 keyboard layouts

There are three ways, and one of them is all you need.

Win+Space, the only one that matters

Hold Win and tap Space. A popup in the corner lists every installed layout.

Keep tapping Space to cycle, and release Win on the one you want.

We’d use this shortcut dozens of times a day. It works almost everywhere.

There’s a second reason to rely on it. On a work laptop, IT may have edited the hotkeys in the legacy Text Services dialog.

Then Ctrl+Shift does nothing, and twenty minutes go by in Settings. Win+Space keeps working, because that dialog can’t reconfigure it.

The language indicator in the taskbar

Near the clock you’ll see ENG, DEU or similar once two or more layouts are installed. Click it and pick from the menu.

Mouse users generally prefer this.

If the indicator is gone, someone usually turned on the desktop language bar. That floating toolbar from Windows 7 replaces the tray icon.

Go to Time & language, Typing, Advanced keyboard settings. Untick “Use the desktop language bar when it’s available”.

The icon comes back. Many “missing language bar” threads on Reddit boil down to this one checkbox.

Left Alt+Shift and Ctrl+Shift

Out of the box, Left Alt+Shift switches between input languages. Ctrl+Shift switches between layouts of the same language.

To edit or disable them, open Advanced keyboard settings and click the blue link, Input language hot keys.

The dialog that opens is straight out of Windows XP. Microsoft never redesigned it.

• Select “Between input languages”.
• Click Change Key Sequence.
• Pick your combination, or Not Assigned, and click OK.

We’d leave both combinations on. Some old Office macros grab odd Alt sequences and now and then clash with Win+Space.

That’s rare. When it happens, Ctrl+Shift as a backup saves a trip to the taskbar.

Setting a default Windows 11 keyboard layout

This is where Microsoft really dropped the ball. The option sits under Typing, not where you’d look.

A typical case: a whole afternoon lost to it. A user has three keyboards, and every boot loads the UK one.

This is what usually does it.

• Open Settings, then Time & language, then Typing. It isn’t under Language & region or Keyboard.
• Select Advanced keyboard settings.
• Under Override for default input method, pick your layout.
• Sign out and sign back in. Check that the indicator shows your choice.

It may not stick the first time. That’s common, and nothing is broken.

Then do the second thing too. Drag your preferred language to the top of Preferred languages.

Inside its Language options, make sure the right keyboard is listed first under Keyboards.

Both together pin the default. The Override alone often gets ignored.

On a fresh machine, we’d do this first, before installing anything else. Our Windows 11 new PC setup guide has it in the first-hour checklist for that reason.

It saves a lot of sign-in screen weirdness later.

When the layout keeps changing

You’re mid-sentence and Alt-Tab away to look something up. You come back, and now you’re typing French.

Microsoft Q&A forum threads on this go back to 2022, and most replies don’t help.

There are usually three causes. We’d check them in this order, since each fix takes under a minute and needs no restart.

Per-app input switching

With this option on, the system remembers your last-used layout per window. Alt-Tab to the browser, and it loads the layout the browser had.

Switch to the mail app, and you get another one. It sounds clever.

In practice it’s awful, unless you deliberately work that way.

To turn it off, open Settings, Time & language, Typing, Advanced keyboard settings. Untick “Let me use a different input method for each app window”.

The flipping stops instantly.

Microsoft account sync

A Microsoft account on several devices syncs language preferences automatically. That’s great until an old tablet had Korean installed once.

From then on every PC you sign into has Korean too.

To stop it, open Settings, Accounts, Windows backup, Remember my preferences. Turn off Language preferences.

Existing layouts stay, but nothing more gets pushed from other devices.

A language pack added a layout

Every language pack you’ve installed added its default keyboard to your active list. Say you added French once for spellcheck in Word.

AZERTY is still rotating through Win+Space.

For the clean-out, go to Language & region and select the three dots next to the unwanted language. Under Language options, Keyboards, remove what you don’t use.

If the whole language is unused, remove it from Language & region with three dots, Remove. That’s much faster.

The order we check things in

• Count the entries in the Win+Space flyout. More than you expect points to a language pack.
• Look at the per-app box under Advanced keyboard settings.
• Look at Language preferences under Windows backup.
• Check the Override drop-down and the order of Preferred languages.
• Compare the sign-in screen indicator with the one in your session.
• Open Preload only after all of that.

Removing a keyboard layout

• Open Settings, then Time & language, then Language & region.
• Select the three dots next to the language, then Language options.
• Find the layout under Keyboards and select its three-dot icon.
• Select Remove.

If Remove is grayed out, it’s the last keyboard for that language. Add another first, or remove the language.

A whole language goes in one click: Language & region, three dots beside it, Remove.

You can’t do this to the current display language, though. Switch the display language to something else first.

Sign out, sign back in, and then remove it.

If a layout still comes back after every reboot, skip ahead to the registry section. The Preload key is the usual culprit.

The sign-in screen has its own layout

The sign-in screen’s layout is separate from your session. Most people never notice, because their defaults match.

Now set your user to Polish while the system stays on English. The sign-in screen loads English QWERTY, and the Polish password fails.

Microsoft could have made this automatic and chose not to.

On a touchscreen, tap that button mid-typing and the layout switches with no Settings menus. It saves the day on a Surface.

Before you touch sign-in layouts on a PC you can only reach remotely, we’d confirm which layout the password was typed in. A password with Y, Z, @ or top-row digits is exactly the kind that fails. Truly lost? See how to reset a Windows 11 password.

Windows 11 keyboard layout troubleshooting cheat sheet

Most layout problems map to a handful of causes. The table pairs each common symptom with the fix that usually works.

Match what you see and jump straight to it.

Sometimes you can’t tell the layout from the hardware. Run the keys through our online keyboard tester.

If a key registers there with the right code but types the wrong character, it’s the layout. No signal at all points to hardware.

Every setting on this page can be put back the way it was.

What moved since Windows 10

The keyboard settings moved more than they changed.

The shortcuts are the same as on Windows 10. Our Windows 10 vs Windows 11 comparison has the full list of what moved.

If you’re still on Windows 10, everything here applies after the move.

Layouts that come built in

The system includes hundreds of layouts. Colemak is the notable gap and has to be installed separately.

US International takes getting used to. For about a week, single quotes turn up everywhere by accident.

DVORAK costs a lot of typing speed at first. Many give up after a month, though some people swear by it.

On 24H2 and later, we’d use the standard French layout.

QWERTZ hurts for the first few days, then it’s fine.

Colemak has been around for nearly two decades, so its absence stings.

Default keyboard by language pack

Install a language and its default keyboard comes along, typically with one to three variants.

Any keyboard can be added to any language in your Preferred list. They aren’t locked to their origin.

Input language, layout and IME

Windows uses two names for related things, and it trips people up. An input language pairs one language with one keyboard.

English US with QWERTY counts as one entry, and English US with DVORAK counts as another.

That’s why Win+Space can cycle through three “English” entries.

An IME, or input method editor, works differently. Japanese, Chinese and Korean can’t map one key to one character.

So the IME shows a candidate window as you type romaji or pinyin. You pick the right character there.

It behaves nothing like a plain layout, yet it lives in the same switcher.

Testing a layout before you switch

The On-Screen Keyboard shows where every character lands. That’s handy before trying DVORAK, Colemak or a foreign layout.

• Press Win+R, type osk and press Enter.
• Install the layout you want to try, if you haven’t yet.
• Press Win+Space to switch to it.
• Watch the on-screen keys redraw live with the other mapping.

It also helps when the legends on your physical keys have worn off. Old ThinkPads come to mind.

A layout button in Quick Settings

Quick Settings can hold a layout button. Click the Wi-Fi, volume or battery icon to open the panel.

Click the pencil icon, Edit quick settings, then Add, and choose Keyboard layout.

Now it’s one tap away from anywhere. That’s good on a tablet, where Win+Space is awkward.

Almost nobody seems to know it exists.

What the old Region control panel still does better

The old Region control panel has one option the Settings app never got. It’s Copy settings on the Administrative tab.

It applies your current layout and regional formats to the Welcome screen and to fresh user accounts in one step.

• Press Win+R, type intl.cpl and press Enter.
• Open the Administrative tab.
• Click Copy settings.
• Tick “Welcome screen and system accounts” and, if you want, “New user accounts”.
• Restart.

On 24H2 there’s no equivalent in Settings, however hard you look. It isn’t there, because Microsoft never ported it.

The same tab holds the system locale button for old non-Unicode programs. Few people ever need it.

But if ancient Japanese or Korean software shows garbled characters, called mojibake, this is the fix.

PowerShell for many machines

Doing this through the interface on 40 laptops would be a crime against IT workers. PowerShell reads and writes the list directly.

First list what’s installed:

$LanguageList = Get-WinUserLanguageList
$LanguageList | ForEach-Object { $_.InputMethodTips }

Then add French AZERTY to the first language in the list:

$LanguageList = Get-WinUserLanguageList
$LanguageList[0].InputMethodTips.Add("040c:0000040c")
Set-WinUserLanguageList $LanguageList -Force

The identifier format is language, colon, keyboard, in hex with no spaces. Microsoft’s documentation has the full list.

These ten are the ones that come up most often.

The edit is per user, applies immediately and needs no reboot. It works well in scripts or imaging.

For whole fleets, look at the next section.

Group Policy, provisioning and unattend

Managed fleets have three routes. A single machine is quicker with PowerShell or Settings.

Group Policy Preferences is the easiest if you already run Active Directory. Push the layout to an OU and forget about it.

A provisioning package sets the layout during first-run setup. So every device is right before a user ever logs in.

That’s what we’d use for 100 machines or more. The learning curve is maybe 30 minutes.

The unattend route is old-school and still works. With a Sysprep workflow, add this line to the International-Core component:

<InputLocale>040c:0000040c</InputLocale>

First-run setup picks it up, with no extra tools to learn.

Where the registry stores it

This is where you end up when the Settings app refuses to do what you tell it. It’s the usual last stop for a stubborn layout.

Values in Preload are named 1, 2, 3 and so on. Each holds a keyboard identifier in hex.

Say a layout won’t go away through Settings. Remove is grayed out, or it keeps coming back after a reboot.

• Export the key as a backup, or make a restore point.
• Delete the layout’s value inside Preload.
• Renumber the rest so they run 1, 2, 3 with no gaps.
• Reboot.

A layout that keeps coming back is typically fixed by exactly this.

Don’t touch the HKLM hive. Those are shared keyboard definitions for every user on the machine. Delete a subkey there and you could break the sign-in screen for everyone. Edit only the Preload key.

Making a custom layout

Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator, MSKLC for short, builds custom layouts. It’s free and comes from Microsoft.

• Load an existing layout as a starting point.
• Remap keys and dead keys.
• Build a setup package and run it.

The custom layout then appears under Add a keyboard like any built-in one.

MSKLC’s interface hasn’t been touched since about 2007, and it looks it. But it works.

A typical case: a translator who needs special Cyrillic transliteration keys. A layout like that takes about an hour to build and keeps working for years.

For a simple swap, such as Caps Lock with Ctrl, don’t build a layout. We’d use PowerToys Keyboard Manager.

It’s much simpler, remaps per key, and can be toggled on and off.

Common mistakes with the Windows 11 keyboard layout

• Switching the display language and expecting the keys to follow.
• Looking for the default under Language & region when it sits under Typing.
• Setting the Override and skipping the order of Preferred languages.
• Leaving per-app input on and blaming the keyboard.
• Installing a language for spellcheck and forgetting its keyboard.
• Trying to remove the last layout of a language.
• Typing a password at sign-in without a glance at the indicator.
• Deleting keys in the HKLM hive.
• Editing Preload with no exported backup.
• Building a custom layout for a single key swap.

Related guides

• Where the Windows key is on any keyboard
• How to disable the Windows key
• Calculator keyboard shortcuts

Terms used on this page

Typical Windows 11 keyboard layout problems

The German laptop

A laptop arrives with German keys, and Y and Z come out swapped. The owner adds the layout that matches the printed keys. Typing is right again within a minute.

The Turkish surprise

One desktop keeps offering Turkish. A relative had borrowed the Microsoft account years ago. With Language preferences off and the layout removed, it stays gone.

The seven languages

Another machine, reimaged at several companies, cycles through seven languages. The unused ones come out in Language & region. Win+Space is down to two entries.

The default that won’t hold

Every boot loads the UK layout, whatever the Override says. The right language goes to the top, with its keyboard first. The next sign-in loads the right one.

The password at the sign-in screen

A Polish password fails at sign-in and works everywhere else. The sign-in screen is on English QWERTY. Copy settings fixes it for good.

The layout that returns

A removed layout is back after each reboot. Its value still sits in Preload. With the value deleted and the rest renumbered, it’s gone.

Windows 11 versions this keyboard layout guide covers