I recently added a new ability to my anaylzer to load in a different set of monogram and bigram frequencies. This makes it possible to analyze layouts for different languages, in which the letter and bigram frequencies may be differ somewhat from English. You can try this for yourself on my updated layout analyzer, but the results are also summarized here:
Note: to generate these, I used frequency tables for the language in question, but the layout tested is the just the standard Colemak(DH)/Dvorak/Qwerty layout, without the special characters or modifications (QWERTZ/AZERTY/etc) which some of these languages use. So it's not a comprehensive analysis as it might be, but hopefully still a useful indicator.
Danish
Layout sf-bigrams score
colemak_dh 4.27% 1.714
colemak 4.27% 1.750
dvorak 4.97% 2.015
qwerty 11.83% 2.348
German
Layout sf-bigrams score
colemak_dh 4.98% 1.695
colemak 4.98% 1.759
dvorak 3.49% 1.900
qwerty 9.93% 2.385
French
Layout sf-bigrams score
colemak_dh 3.60% 1.630
colemak 3.60% 1.644
dvorak 3.56% 1.894
qwerty 9.25% 2.348
Spanish
Layout sf-bigrams score
colemak_dh 3.25% 1.655
colemak 3.25% 1.683
dvorak 2.48% 1.889
qwerty 9.65% 2.311
Polish
Layout sf-bigrams score
colemak_dh 3.80% 1.929
colemak 3.80% 1.948
dvorak 6.82% 2.174
qwerty 9.43% 2.474
Swedish
Layout sf-bigrams score
colemak_dh 4.13% 1.708
colemak 4.13% 1.730
dvorak 4.31% 1.983
qwerty 10.15% 2.316
On this quick test, it's interesting to note that:
- Qwerty is by the far the worst in every language :P
- The language gaining least from Colemak is Polish. French and German gain the most - presumably because these languages are "closer" to English.
- There is a noticeable same-finger penalty in all languages, but at least in Colemak it's always less severe than Qwerty.
- Colemak beats Dvorak in each language, although interestingly, Dvorak has low same-finger for Spanish!
- Mod-DH still comes out the best (of the 4 layouts tested) in each language (yay!)
Those who know some of these languages might be able interpret the results better than I can.
Using Colemak-DH with Seniply.