As a result of the 2004 enlargement there are now twenty languages that are accorded official, and theoretically equal, status in the institutions of the European Union. With the expansion of the Union’s linguistic landscape some Union bodies, while allowing the use of more and more languages, have paradoxically limited the circumstances under which most of them may be used. To put it mildly, these efforts, as Advocate-General Poiares Maduro said in his opinion in Case C-160/03, Kingdom of Spain v. Eurojust, 2005 ECR I-2077, have been ‘a matter of some controversy’.
