What’s the difference between Austrian and German keyboard layout?

I just changed the keyboard layout on a Mac to match my German keyboard, and realised for the first time that macOS offers an Austrian and a German keyboard layout.

However, I’ve no clue what could be difference between a German and and an Austrian keyboard layout. As far as I can tell they are exactly the same. Wikipedia also treats the Austrian and German keyboard layout as the same thing.

Furthermore, macOS doesn’t seem to offer a keyboard layout for every local region, e.g. there’s only a single Spanish keyboard layout.

I just checked Ubuntu and also they offer a "German (Austria)" keyboard layout.

So what’s the difference between the Austrian and German layout?

2 Answers

So what’s the difference?

It appears that there are two different keyboard layouts (they are both QWERTZ layouts). The layouts may have different names depending on what operating system you are looking at:

1. One for Germany/Austria, and,

2. One for Switzerland/Luxembourg.

Here are the two layouts.

Germany/Austria

Swiss German

Source Keyboard layouts

The presence of various geographical profiles for regions with the exact same keyboard layout, does not definitely involve a difference in the layout itself, but predictions and corrections used for that dialect. As an example, according to duden:

SYNONYME ZU BEUGEN:

(Sprachwissenschaft) flektieren; (österreichische Sprachwissenschaft) biegen

So, the equivalent of "to decline, or to conjugate a verb/noun/pronoun/article" in German (Germany)'s linguistics is called "beugen", while in German (Austria)'s linguistics, "biegen" is used instead.

Note: this is just an example, and may, or may not be included in real world predictions and corrections. Just to have a clue of why same layouts should have different profiles.