The most common languages spoken in the Philippines today are English and Filipino, which is based on Tagalog. Spanish was an official language of the country until the change of government in 1987, which led to Spanish being dropped as an official language for political reasons. However, the government of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, a Spanish speaker herself, reintroduced the study of Spanish into the state-school system. After the US invasion in 1898, the Americans embarked on a policy of dehispanicisation and urged the Filipino government to choose Tagalog and English as the official languages. There are around 3 million Spanish speakers, of whom a minority still speaks Spanish in public; these people are mostly of Hispanic origin. For anyone from a Hispanophone nation the Philippines is strangely recognizable to them since the Spanish influence has remained strong to this day.