Models can serve as powerful tools for uncovering how a simple change process may lead to striking emergent outcomes [1,2], and likewise, how small revisions in assumptions can lead to dramatic shifts in how a system is predicted to behave [3]. Here we use simple modelling to demonstrate that analogical changes in inflectional systems can be expected to have a particularly counterintuitive, yet empirically well-supported, long-term effect: namely, inflectional classes’ and stem alternation patterns’ resilience against levelling, even as they undergo constant analogical change [4].