Otto Dempwolff is far better known for his historical and comparative work than for his descriptive and theoretical contributions to linguistics. However, the work to which he devoted his last efforts before he died in 1938 was a grammatical description of Jabem, an Austronesian language adopted and spread as a church and school lingua franca by the German Lutheran mission in what is now Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea.

Although Jabem is one of the best-documented languages in Melanesia (at least in Jabem and German), the only materials available in English have been Streicher's...