Thin Nu Waab

Thin Nu Waab, the language of Waab, is the Yapese name for the tongue of the Yap Main Islands in the western Carolines. It is an Austronesian language of the Oceanic branch, though its exact subgroup is disputed, and distinct from the Chuukic languages spoken on Yap's outlying atolls.

Around 950 the village of Gatcheper in Gagil built a maritime tribute network, later called the Yapese Empire, that stretched more than 1,300 kilometres east toward Chuuk and carried Yapese speech and customs across the western Carolines. Yapese navigators sailed to Palau to quarry the great stone disks called rai, towing them home on rafts behind their canoes.

Alvaro de Saavedra sighted Yap in 1528; Spain counted the islands among its Philippine possessions from the seventeenth century. The language remained unwritten in this period and had ejective fricatives.