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).