Dadanitic is the script and possibly the language of the oasis of Dadān (modern Al-'Ula) and the kingdom of Liḥyān in northwestern Arabia, spoken probably some time during the second half of the first millennium BCE.

This taxonomy has not held up and in 2000 Michael C. A. Macdonald proposed that all the inscriptions be treated as a single group under the name Dadanitic, to indicate the place where the majority have been found and to clearly indicate that the term is a linguistic as opposed to an ethnic one (by analogy with Arab–Arabic).

[3] The grammar of Dadanitic is poorly understood, and while several of the following features exclude its belonging to the Arabic category, more work is required to establish its correct position in the Semitic family.

Other examples of linguistic variation attested in the Dadanitic corpus seem to further support the idea that there was a difference between the written and spoken languages at Dadan.

[5] Dadanitic has the same repertoire of 28 phonemes as Arabic and is the only ancient member of the South Semitic script family to use matres lectionis.