ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates the progressive dynamics of underbidding and outbidding as manifested in the area of linguistic recognition. It overviews the Taiwanese co-officialization movement of 2002, during which legislators from the more radically pro-independence Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) proposed, in vain, to have Hoklo recognized as a second official language. Since promoting Hoklo as co-official language was not politically viable for the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), the party drafted a Language Equality Law (LEL) proposal aimed at recognizing all of Taiwan's ethnic languages as equal national languages. If the LEL already represented a compromise in the eyes of many Hoklo revivalists, it was still deemed too radical a change from Taiwan's Mandarin-dominated language regime, which led the DPP to sponsor a much toned down National Languages Development Law proposal instead. The Hoklo co-officialization movement was an attempt by Deep-Green Hoklo nationalists to push for Hoklo recognition as official language.
