Sublime

The Portuguese were a network, held together by religion and language, and with better sources of market information in long-distance trades than their purely Asian counterparts.11 Portuguese became the lingua franca of maritime Asia. The very marginality of the Portuguese as an alien maritime subculture helped to make them acceptable to government

Once you have a set of symbols and a linear order agreed upon by a culture, you have a language.

Language replacement always is accompanied by revised self–perceptions, a restructuring of the cultural classifications within which the self is defined and reproduced. Negative evaluations associated with the dying language lead to a descending series of reclassifications by succeeding generations, until no one wants to speak like Grandpa any more