The only people I've ever heard scoff at the idea of culture and language being intertwined have been unilingual anglophones. Funny coincidence.

I'm actually dismayed at the comparison of language with tech standardisation. Sure, it's silly to pretend that learning English isn't economically or socially beneficial, no one is arguing against that. But you're essentially saying that the language I love in, I think in, I learn in, I exchange in, I live in is substandard because what, fewer people speak it?? Language is culture and culture can only live through language, it's normal for people to want to preserve that. Language is more to humans than a simple communication protocol.

A language is simply a means for two people to communicate ideas, and that is paramount to a functioning society. Without a common method to exchange ideas, you can't have a society.

You realize French is a language, used by people in Québec (and across Canada, there are a million francophones outside Québec) as the common method of exchanging ideas? Is Québec not a functioning society, or at least as functional as anglophone-majority provinces?

[...]anyone in the tech industry knows the problems that come with having multiple, competing, interoperable standards.

Just curious, if Mandarin suddenly became the new lingua franca overnight, and your province's Mandarin-speaking population was growing constantly, would you just throw English away and learn Mandarin?