Il sorgere in Italia della linguistica orientalista: la linguistica cinese e giapponese

Italian scholars have always had a very important role in the genesis and development of Chinese and Japanese linguistics, a fact which holds true to the present day. Italians authored some seminal works in those fields, even though their contribution was not always properly acknowledged. The aim of this paper is to describe and analyze, in a concise fashion, the history of the study of languages of China and Japan in Italy, providing an overview of the most important Italian (or anyway Italian-language) contributions on those languages. Our overview starts from the earliest known descriptions of Sinitic and Japonic languages written by Italians, and covers the period until the end of the XX century, as linguistic studies on Chinese and Japanese in Italy reached full maturity in the latter two decades of the past century.