Use the question "why?" to drill down to the real reason people are asking for a thing, be that a piece of technology, a new feature, a new tool or to use a new language.
The trick is to ask it more than once. You may hear the term "5 whys" used as a technique in retrospectives and incident post-mortems. Use it to drill down to find the assumptions beneath what people are asking for and the causes beneath the symptoms that people are reporting.
[example]
More variants on this exist. Good questions to drill down into a situation are: