In the last few decades a globalising trend has affected the legal field, where an international perspective is becoming more and more widespread. However, in spite of the growing efforts of the international community to guarantee greater and greater harmonisation in legislation and procedures, local constraints and specific cultural aspects still represent a relevant conditioning factor. This is clearly visible in the normative texts in use in the various contexts which show discrepancies deriving not only from differing legal and cultural systems, but also from the use of different linguistic codes. To exemplify these issues, the paper takes into consideration some relevant changes taking place in a specific type of legal discourse -i.e. that concerning the field of arbitration- as used in multilingual and multicultural contexts, in order to illustrate phenomena related to the globalising trends taking place in this field and to the maintenance of linguistic and cultural identities reaffirmed at a local level. To illustrate the various phenomena, examples are drawn from legislation on international arbitration based on the Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration issued by the United Nations and later integrated into the laws of several countries with varying constitutional, sociocultural and economic conditions.