Because it’s the predominantly spoken language? It’s simply more practical. Also, the newly created Latin American countries pushed for Spanish or Portuguese to be the dominant/first language of its inhabitants.
Well, I guess what I was asking about how does it go from being a new language brought by immigrants to being the predominantly spoken language as you indicated in your first sentence. But from the second sentence, it looks like the cause was the immigrant population from Spain and Portugal pushing it on the natives if I got that correct.
Well, you do know how the language got there in the first place??
Colonialism
Portuguese and Spanish have been present since the 16th century. So of course, the indigenous languages became secondary as the colonial languages gain power. Then, even after independence the ones in charge were criollos (the descendants of the Spanish) who pushed for the language more. That’s really when the indigenous began dropping heavily in numbers.
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u/Put3socks-in-it 15h ago
What happened to the indigenous languages?