to google/should be "who is a Slavic speaker?"

[colkitto]

I will take the liberty of quoting from my review of Dixon The Rise and Fall 
of Languages (1999)

"...... disentangling all the different strata in so-called hybrid languages 
is admittedly difficult, but not impossible, if proper use is made of all 
available items of evidence. Eggers (1998) provides examples of how close 
analysis of linguistic material can often disentangle quite fine strands, in 
this case various Judeo-Romance, Bavarian, Slavic, and Hebrew components in 
Yiddish."

.........

[A] much-discussed phenomenon in historical linguistics is relexification, 
which involves situations where a language preserves its original 
grammatical structure during a period of close language contact while 
borrowing most of its lexicon from another language. Some of the examples 
cited by Thomason & Kaufman (1988), and discussed by Dixon, appear to this 
involve this process (see above). Welsh may also provide a relevant example. 
Currently in South Wales a form of relexification appears to be actually 
under way. Many children in Glamorgan and the Rhondda whose first language 
is English are being educated through the medium of Welsh. However, there 
have been no actual Welsh-speaking communities in those areas since about 
1850. The Welsh that such children actually use, however, may be described 
as English structure with a Welsh lexicon: partially parallel to the 
Yiddish/Hebrew situation described by Wexler. This type of Welsh is called 
bratiaith (jargon), and is regarded with scorn by many speakers from North 
Wales, who often claim that it is incomprehensible. However, if the decline 
of Welsh in rural communities coupled with the increase in numbers of 
speakers of bratiaith continues, one day the latter might be the only type 
of Welsh left.

So-called revived languages may also constitute partial examples of 
relexification. Further on (Chapter 8, p.111n.), Dixon cites Hebrew as a 
canonical example of a revived language. He points out that Modern Hebrew 
has borrowed syntactic constructions from the Indo-European languages spoken 
by Jews before they switched to Hebrew.fn. Similar criticism has been voiced 
of revived Cornish, which is mostly based on the language of medieval 
miracle plays. As Dixon points out, the examples of Hebrew (as well as 
Cornish) show that even if language revivalists are successful in persuading 
a critical mass of speakers to (re)learn and (re)use dead or moribund 
languages, the revived languages often undergo massive structural borrowings 
from the native or functional languages of the speakers who are making the 
switch. This is all the more reason to heed Dixon’s concluding call 
(135-138) for recording languages currently on the brink of extinction.

fn. In a recent series of works Wexler has proposed that Yiddish, and by 
extension Modern Hebrew, are actually Slavic languages which have undergone 
massive relexification (see Wexler 1993, and the literature cited therein). 
His proposal has remained controversial, see, e.g., the mainly negative 
reviews cited in Wexler 1993:305). "

Eggers, Eckhard. 1998. Sprachwandel und Sprachmischung im Jiddischen. 
Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang.

Thomason Sarah G. & Terrence Kaufman. 1988. Language Contact: Creolization 
and Genetic Linguistics. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Wexler, Paul. 1993. The Ashkenazic Jews: A Slavo-Turkic people in search of 
a Jewish identity. Columbus: Slavica."

So the question is: are processes such as massive structural borrowing and 
relexification enough to move a language from one family into another? 
Wexler clearly thinks that they are. He may well have a point.

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