Asian countries prefer VHDL. VHDL was invented by US Defense so lot of people think that it perfect. Pacific and rest of the world is using Verilog. Syntax of Verilog is much similer to C language. It is difficult to remember syntax of VHDL especially for Software engineer. Industries not wishing to maintain two different team like RTL and Software so Verilog was invented. So software engineer with some training can design RTL and software. Also during debugging software engineer can understand Verilog code as C syntax and Verilog syntax has similarities.