The Italic group includes the closely related dialects spoken in ancient Italy.

The ancestor of the Italic languages seems to have been closely associated with ancestral forms of Celtic and German.

Italic shares with Celtic the division into a "p" and a "q" branch, Osco-Umbrian being the "p" branch and Latin-Faliscan the "q" branch.

Latin and Faliscan may have been brought to Italy over the Alps and the Apennines to the coast in the Early Bronze age. They were later isolated by the intrusion of non Indo-European Etruscan.

The Osco-Umbrian speakers arrived later and Oscan did not cross into Sicily until 300 BCE.

Other Indo-European languages, unrelated to Italic were spoken in Italy. Among these were Venetic, Messapic and southern Picene. Northern Picene cannot be translated and it may well be non Indo-European.

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