Yabem or Jabêm is an Austronesian language spoken natively (in 1978) by about 2000 people at the southern tip of the Huon Peninsula in Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea. However, Yabem was adopted as local lingua franca for evangelical and educational purposes by the German Lutheran missionaries who first arrived at Simbang, a Yabem-speaking village, in 1886.
By 1939, it was spoken by as many as 15,000 people, and understood by as many as 100,000 (Zahn 1940). In the decade after World War II, the mission's network of schools managed to educate 30,000 students using Yabem as the medium of instruction (Streicher 1982). Although the usage of Yabem as a local lingua franca has now been replaced by Tok Pisin, Yabem remains one of the best documented Austronesian languages, with extensive instructional and liturgical materials (including many original compositions, not just translations from German or English) as well as grammars and dictionaries.
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