Russian-Tatar united keyboard layout

What is it?

This is a new keyboard layout that is the same as the Russian one but with Tatar letters set as an alternative symbols (with the rAlt or right alt pressed). The Tatar letters are located above their Russian pairs (rAlt + а for "ә", rAlt + н for "ң", etc.), so that it is easy to find them and no need to remember their location.

Russian (plus Tatar letters)

What is it for?

Many Tatars use Russian language as the primary language of communication, so they have Russian keyboard layout on their devices. Classic Tatar layout does have all the Russian letters in it which in theory allows you to use it as a universal layout for both languages. But the layout is different from Russian one — it was made for comfort typing in Tatar so the Russian letters that are rarely used in Tatar language (ё, ж, ц, щ, ъ, ь) are set as an alternative symbols (you need to press rAlt for using them). This makes writing in Russian inconvenient, so many people refuse to use the classic Tatar layout.

Tatar (the classic one)

All this led us in a situation where Tatars can't write in Tatar language because they don't have the proper keyboard layout. Here is the statistics showing how Yandex users search for the Tatar song by Alina Sharipzhanova "Рәхмәт сүзе":

As we see the count of requests that use transliteration to Russian alphabet ("рэхмэт сузе") is significantly exceeds the count of requests in Tatar language. People in search requests more often write Tatar words using the Russian layout.

That is the reason why first of all this new Russian-Tatar layout is a Russian layout. All the letters and symbols are keeping their places. Those who would change their Russian layout to this Russian-Tatar one would not consider any differencies — no discomfort, no need to retrain or change habits, everything is the same. But as a bonus, there would be the way to write in Tatar language if needed.

This will allow not only to write search requests in Tatar, but also to use Tatar in everyday communication, preserving cultural identity and allowing the language to spread.

What does the new layout contain?

While creating this layout, first of all I took the standard Russian layout and added special characters from English layout to it because in modern conversations we often use symbols like at or hashtag which Russian layout doesn't have. Just take the standard English layout, which is drawn on the average keyboard, and add its special characters (only those that are not already presented) as a third layer on the same buttons they are located in the English layout.

ru + en typography

Next is typography used in Cyrillic languages. We could just take the Birman's layout — everything is there, but it seems redundant to me. Our goal is to place Tatar symbols on top of Russian letters later, so we want to leave the letter block as free as possible. To the required minimum, I included two types of quotation marks, non-breaking spaces (including zero width), em dash, en dash, an apostrophe, a paragraph mark, a list marker, an accent and an ellipsis. Both the list of these symbols and their location may be debatable, but I am open to discussion.

Now let's add these symbols to our layout. The angle brackets had to be moved from their place, because for the Russian language quotes are much more important, and this place is very convenient. Then we also move the single quotation mark just to free up the letter. In addition, it would be quite logical for a single quote to be next to a double quote.

ru-typography

In general, it turned out to be a good layout for the Russian language. On its basis we will make a Russian-Tatar united one. And we will save this one, so that Russian-Bashkir united, Russian-Udmurt united and any other can be made on its basis later.

Finally, we add Tatar letters next to their pairs. The opening square and curly brackets had to be shifted, because Tatar letters are more important here (in the basic Russian layout, we will leave these symbols in place).

rtu

Done!

At the output we have two layouts. One is based on the other.

Russian (plus typographic symbols)

Russian (plus Tatar letters)

For mobile devices

For mobile devices that use on-screen keyboard the algorithm is similar: keep everything the same as Russian layout including dictionaries for swipe input and autocorrection but add extra characters above related Russian ones. Those characters are selected by holding the button: hold "а" for "ә", hold "н" for "ң" etc.

It is still a layout for Russian language but with additional characters for Tartar.

How to install?

Linux

The layouts are already present in the system and you can install them through the settings app. You should turn exotic layouts on first.

If your system uses an older version of xkeyboard-config (<2.38 for Russian with typographic symbols and <2.39 for Russian with Tatar letters), you can use layout files from here, and instructions for enabling it in the system from here.

Windows

To install the layouts described here in Windows download them from the links below.

Unzip the downloaded archive, find the setup.exe file and launch it. After you allow the file to be executed and the installation is successful, the layout will be selected as one of your system layouts.

But if you (as I am) want the Russian-Tatar layout to be available in Windows out of the box, then support the following proposal in the Microsoft Feedback Hub:

Try in browser

You can use special playground to try this layout in browser without having to install anything: