It's far from exclusive to Perl. You're right that Python can handle it; I don't know about Ruby, but there are plenty of other languages that do, the granddaddy of them all being Lisp.

It doesn't require that things be based on lists of arguments, of course, though it helps (that's the way Lisp does it!), and it doesn't even require a dynamic language. For example, the completely static language O'Caml provides named arguments as a syntactic feature, with compile-time checking etc.