South Picene is an extinct Italic language, belonging to the Sabellic subfamily. It is considered by SIL International to belong to the Umbrian Group although in the long history of its attempted classification it has been placed at a higher level, parallel to Oscan and Umbrian within Sabellic, or even higher, parallel to Sabellic within Italic. It is apparently unrelated to the as yet undeciphered North Picene language. South Picene texts were at first relatively inscrutable even though some words were clearly Indo-European. The discovery in 1983 that two of the apparently redundant punctuation marks were in reality simplified letters led to an incremental improvement in their understanding and a first translation in 1985. Difficulties remain.