Sara Pacchiarotti and Koen Bostoen have a new article titled “Final Vowel Loss in Lower Kasai Bantu (drc) as a Contact-Induced Change” out in the open access Journal of Language Contact as part of the BantuFirst project. They present a qualitative and quantitative comparative account of this diachronic sound shift and argue that it rose relatively late in Bantu language history as a contact-induced change and affected adjacent West-Coastal and Central-Western Bantu languages belonging to different phylogenetic clusters.