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.
More variants on this exist. Good questions to drill down into a situation are: