  Language change involves the competition between alternative linguistic forms
(1). The spontaneous evolution of these forms typically results in monotonic
growths or decays (2, 3) like in winner-take-all attractor behaviors. In the
case of the Spanish past subjunctive, the spontaneous evolution of its two
competing forms (ended in -ra and -se) was perturbed by the appearance of the
Royal Spanish Academy in 1713, which enforced the spelling of both forms as
perfectly interchangeable variants (4), at a moment in which the -ra form was
dominant (5). Time series extracted from a massive corpus of books (6) reveal
that this regulation in fact produced a transient renewed interest for the old
form -se which, once faded, left the -ra again as the dominant form up to the
present day. We show that time series are successfully explained by a
two-dimensional linear model that integrates an imitative and a novelty
component. The model reveals that the temporal scale over which collective
attention fades is in inverse proportion to the verb frequency. The integration
of the two basic mechanisms of imitation and attention to novelty allows to
understand diverse competing objects, with lifetimes that range from hours for
memes and news (7, 8) to decades for verbs, suggesting the existence of a
general mechanism underlying cultural evolution.
