Where did Brazil get their language from?

Answer 1

After Columbus's arrival to America Spain and Portugal made an agreement to colonise separate parts of America. The Catholic Church gave the Spanyards permission to colonise the western part and the Portuguese the eastern, laying it under the respective crowns. The different Indian (native American) tribes had disparate languages and only small area dominion, and thus didn't have a national language, or lingua franca, with few exceptions, like Quechua in the Inca empire. The viceroys and local governors as well as other administrators had their roots in Europe so they used Spanish or Portuguese as their administration language, generally disregarding the existing local indigenous languages.

Even when Brazil became independent in 1822, the rich and ruling classes were mostly of Portuguese descent and keeping Portuguese as the national official language until now, but it has developed away from European Portuguese, in the same fashion as North American English. Now it has got own spelling rules, some differences in vocabulary, grammar practice and pronunciation. It is often regarded merely as a dialect of Portuguese as it is basically intelligible with European and African variants of Portuguese. In slow speech comprehension is virtually 100%.

Settlers had come from other countries too, so also Spanish and German is used at certain locations, besides the indigenous languages. At the border with the Spanish speaking countries it is common with Portuñol, a mixture of Portuguese and Spanish.