If you want something you can use from within django, try:

from django.conf import settings

this will be in the format above, making it perfect for assignment in one of your models choices= fields. (i.e. user_language = models.CharField(max_length=7, choices=settings.LANGUAGES))

LANGUAGES = (
    ('ar', gettext_noop('Arabic')),
    ('bg', gettext_noop('Bulgarian')),
    ('bn', gettext_noop('Bengali')),
    etc....
    )

Note about using settings:

Note that django.conf.settings isn’t a module

I understood from Django Project that you can only use a dummy gettext function:

If you define a custom LANGUAGES setting, as explained in the previous bullet, it’s OK to mark the languages as translation strings — but use a “dummy” ugettext() function, not the one in django.utils.translation. You should never import django.utils.translation from within your settings file, because that module in itself depends on the settings, and that would cause a circular import.”.

It took me some time to find the solution, but I finally got it; the choices of the model field needs to have a tuple with real gettext functions, with a lambda function the dummy’s can be wrapped in the real gettext functions as follows:

from django.utils.translation import ugettext_lazy as _

language = models.CharField(max_length=5, choices=map(lambda (k,v): (k, _(v)), settings.LANGUAGES), verbose_name=_('language'))

from django.conf import settings

 #note settings is an object , hence you cannot import its contents

 settings.configure()

 #note LANGUAGES is a tuple of tuples

 lang_dict = dict(settings.LANGUAGES)

 #use lang_dict for your query.

 print lang_dict['en']

Regards

sachin

Previous answers mention only getting LANGUAGE from settings.py, hovewer there is a big chance that this variable will be overwritten. So, you can get the full list from django.conf.global_settings.LANGUAGES

from django.db import models

from django.conf.global_settings import LANGUAGES

class ModelWithLanguage(models.Model):
    language = models.CharField(max_length=7, choices=LANGUAGES)