In my personal experiences with AwesomeWM, I could not seem to set the DVORAK keyboard layout without messing around with the xorg.conf files, and even then it was to no avail.
As an actual solution [or in other words 'work around' to this, the ~/.xinitrc file must contain:
setxkbmap -layout dvorak [or ru, fr, etc..]
Before the line:
exec awesome
And that should solve the issue.