PDO associative arrays - return associative

Everybody forgot about the

$sth->fetchAll(PDO::FETCH_KEY_PAIR);

Not really sure if there's any better way. You could try this?

$rows = $statement->fetchAll(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC);

$languages = array();

function getLangs($col, $row) {
     $languages[$col['id']] = $col['name'];
}

array_walk($rows, 'getLangs');

There's nothing wrong with foreach loops. I'd actually use what you've got. It's hard to get cleaner than that...

UPDATE:

After carefully re-reading your question, what you REALLY should be asking is whether you can format your QUERY in such a way that the results are returned in a different format.

The way that your normal SELECT query is returned is thusly:

+----+----------+
| id |     name |
+----+----------+
|  1 |  svenska |
|  2 | engelska |
| .. |      ... |
| .. |      ... |
+----+----------+

$row = array(
    row_1 => array(
        id   => "1",
        name => "svenska"
    ),
    row_2 => array(
        id   => "2",
        name => "engelska"
    ),
    row_3 => array(
        id   => "...",
        name => "..."
    ),
    row_4 => array(
        id   => "...",
        name => "..."
    )
)

$row[$row_number][$column_name] = $value

What you're asking for is for some way to return your query results like THIS:

// Query result is only one row, with each 'id' as column name
// And the 'name' from the same row as it's value...

+---------+----------+-----+-----+-----+
|       1 |        2 | ... | ... | ... |
+---------+----------+-----+-----+-----+
| svenska | engelska | ... | ... | ... |
+---------+----------+-----+-----+-----+

$row = array(
    row_1 => array(
          1 => "svenska",
          2 => "engelska",
        ... => "...",
        ... => "...",
        ... => "..."
    )
)

$languages = $row[row_1];
$languages[$id] = $name;

I'm not entirely sure you CAN do this in SQL, to be perfectly honest. I would also recommend against it, even if you could. It would be horrendous for a scaling table. If your table is static, then why not format it in the way I just mentioned to begin with? Why not just have it in a static PHP array in an include file?