[Aerroon]

>Even Japanese, a language used by 125 million, has similar issues, my Japanese coworkers frequently switch to English during technical discussions.

It's a chicken and egg problem. If you don't do technical discussions on Japanese now then you won't do them in the future either. You have to consciously start doing that and then eventually you'll do it that way as a preference.

>why not just use the popular languages?

Because you will then take over their cultural baggage. Look at English and the internet. Americans are outnumbered and yet it's expected that people follow the norms of American culture online.

If you speak German on the same websites then those norms more or less disappear.

[fomine3]

> You have to consciously start doing that and then eventually you'll do it that way as a preference.

For Japanese, it's opposite. People aren't good at English so Japanese tech writing/talk is everyone's preference. Also Katakana helps a lot to import foreign words. Top people learn English, import words, wrote their text, and talked in Japanese.

Now Japanese texts are getting not popular (due to not profitable) and many English texts are very easily accessible thanks to internet and it's lingua franca. So finally many Japanese are going to learn English to catch up.