Pipe symbol and black slash no longer working on my Ubuntu 20.04 OS

[mahesh]

Hi,
in the past I have always been able to use the pipe symbol on my qwerty Lenovo Thinkpad laptop (Ubuntu 20.04 OS). But recently, I've been unable to type in the command line "last|head," to give but one example, because the | now comes out as a < and the back slash \ as a > [I am typing this on a spare Windows computer that I have sitting around at home.]

Does anyone know what kind of bug could have caused this sudden keyboard switch?

Since the pipe symbol is important for all kinds of command lines, I'd be grateful for a suggestion.

Thanks.