How to force the default language in CLI-scripts?

[lpa]

We have some CLI and API scripts, that are not bound to Processwire pages/templates. They include PW at the start and then do something like:

foreach ( $pages->find('template=item, derp=derpson') as $item ) {
   echo $item->field_with_multilang;
}

In these scripts we cannot get PW to honor the default language, user language or anything else. The only way to get this to work is to

$item->field_with_multilang->getLanguageValue('default')

We're hoping to avoid this because out application is vast, and many modules are used both in $page context and in cli scripts.  This mean that we cannot have confidence in the type of the field and writing code like if ( is_string(<field>) ) { do this } else { do that } would cause massive bloat.

Please advice. How can we force default language at the start of the script?

PS We've already tried stuff like:

$user->langauge = $languages->getLanguage('default');
$languages->setLanguage('default');