determining Preferred Language in OS X via cli

Question

I was hoping to do something like:

defaults read -g AppleLanguages | awk -F, '/[^(]/{print $1;exit}'

but if only one language is listed in "Preferred Languages", then defaults read -g AppleLanguages returns an error:

The domain/default pair of (kCFPreferencesAnyApplication, AppleLanguages) does not exist

It works fine if multiple languages are listed. Does anyone have a reliable way of determining the language selected for a given user in OS X?

Answer 1

The only difference is the comma. Conditionally remove the comma if it's there.

defaults read -g AppleLanguages | sed -n "2p" | tr -d ,