“The goal of the game is to teach players how to read baybayin,” says Ramos, a 24-year-old Manila-based enthusiast. “I want people to view the game as a way to reconnect to our history, to reconnect to our roots.”

Colonists from Spain forced the local people to learn the Spanish language and alphabet. Many of the native tongues and scripts across the nation’s 7,000 islands eventually faded into obscurity from lack of use.

Ramos’ linguistic card game comes at a time when dwindling local languages – both written and spoken – are experiencing a global renaissance. Once suppressed or banned by invaders or overlords, they have been revived by passionate loyalists in recent decades.

Children in Wales were beaten for speaking Welsh at school within living memory and the language was swamped by English; now Welsh is the language of instruction in many schools in Wales.

Fostering local languages is closely aligned with a resurgence of ethnic pride and an increasing disdain for the tainted legacy of colonialism.

In the Philippines, English and other foreign languages are still accorded a lingering prestige, and English is one of the nation’s two official languages. A legacy of the years when the Philippines was a US territory (beginning in 1898) English is intensively taught in many Filipino schools, and fluency in the language is considered a useful skill.

But at the same time there has been increasing interest in the ancient writing systems once used by early Filipinos, including baybayin, and how these scripts relate to local languages still widely in use. More than 130 languages and a range of different scripts still exist in the Philippines, and experts have concluded that Filipinos were literate in their own languages before the arrival of the Spanish colonists, when the country became known as the Philippines.

Ramos says her card game, which began life as a simple undergraduate thesis for her visual communication course, has evolved into “a gateway to make people more nationalistic”. Named Talinghaga, the game uses the flowing script of baybayin, which is based on syllables.

“It is wonderful that there is renewed interest,” says Leo Emmanuel Castro, a long-time baybayin scholar and the executive director of the Filipino cultural organisation Sanghabi.

“For the longest time, we [Filipinos] have viewed our language and culture as inferior to Western ones,” he says. “It is not wrong to learn a new language or culture; but never forget your own, because the study of baybayin and of the Filipino language is a study of oneself.”

In line with this surge in national pride, even the country’s name has come into question. Castro doesn’t use the terms “Filipino” or “Philippines” when he’s discussing baybayin, because neither existed when the writing system was widely in use in the centuries before Spain invaded.

“Because Maharlika is a Malay word,” Duterte said at the time. “And it means more of a concept of serenity and peace.”

For her part, Ramos says she named her card game Talinghaga – meaning “metaphor” in Tagalog – “because I think the game is a metaphor for the development of our [Filipino] wisdom”.

A game of Talinghaga is played in three rounds by two to four players, who form Tagalog words using 90 cards printed with baybayin symbols.

“Besides forming words, players can also change the words [already in play],” Ramos says. For instance, players can choose to add a new syllable to another player’s word, and change it, in the way that affixes change the meaning of Filipino words.

Talinghaga players can form words from the other Filipino languages as well, and they can use slang or colloquial terms.

“We used to have stricter rules in playing; but now, we let players do what they think is fun, because our main goal is for them to learn,” Ramos says.

Vincci Santiago, a university instructor of the Filipino language, says the card game is a welcome addition to the teaching aids now used by language instructors in the country.

“For me, what is proper is what is effective,” he says. “How Filipino is being taught, and how it’s being introduced in schools, should be sensitive to the changes that are happening to it as the years go by. We cannot just use methods that were in use in the 1950s and expect a young child who’s exposed to Facebook and the internet to still be able to adapt to it.”

The Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino (Commission on the Filipino Language), or KWF, agrees that language and script learning can take many forms, and picking it up by playing can work well.

“Learning the Filipino language must not be confined within a classroom; because it is through language that we learn about the world,” says Rene Roy Cagalingan, one of the KWF’s senior language researchers. “It’s a big thing, it’s a good thing that the willingness to create modern learning materials transcends different mediums, especially the most accessible ones.”

Talinghaga has been well received, and Ramos hopes she can develop similar games for other Filipino languages and scripts. With her colleague, special education teacher Juan Miguel Tolentino, she has field-tested the game with several different social groups across the country.

According to Tolentino, college students and young professionals showed the most interest in the card game, and Ramos has been invited to a few college events organised by student councils to demonstrate and discuss the game.

Game Detective, the company that sells and distributes Talinghaga, is enthusiastic about the game’s potential.

“Our dream is for it to play a role in the education of children in the language,” says Coco Quimpo, the company’s managing partner. She and her team visit schools throughout the country to market the game.

She says one teacher bought five sets using her own money. “It’s great because, for one thing, it means that educators are open to using it in their classrooms; but also, you have people who are genuinely hyped about the product,” she says.

Pat Maliwat, one of the students who asked Ramos to demonstrate Talinghaga, says young Filipinos are keen to learn baybayin by playing the card game.

“We initially had a target of 20 to 30 attendees, but our team was surprised because that number doubled,” she says.