my %list = { 'lang' => 'de' };
You want: 
my %list = ( 'lang' => 'de' );
my $listref = \%list;

[download]
(Note the parens).

Or you can do my $listref = { 'lang' => 'de' };(Note the curly braces).

Once you do that, print $listref->{'lang'} should print de, not any kind of stringified hash.

Check out perlref for more detail. Basically, the parenthese produce a list (which you can assign to a hash and then take a reference), and the curly braces produce an anonymous hash, whose reference you can store in a scalar.

Update
Added a little more detail....

In reply to Re: REF instead of HASH-ref by VSarkiss
in thread REF instead of HASH-ref by zetetes

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