Speaking of Aramaic, are you familiar with this site: http://semarch.uni-hd.de/index.php4?
It's run and contributed to by the same people who gave us Semitica Viva and other fascinating stuff published by the Harrassowitz Verlag in Wiesbaden and also includes some recordings of Jewish Neo-Aramaic from the region around lake Urmia (http://semarch.uni-hd.de/tondokumente.php4?GR_ID=7&LD_ID=10&RG_ID=11).

Aramaic is a language with a fascinating and very complex story. The Babylonians and the Persians used it as their official language, and afterward, it was mainly a Jewish language.
I would take issue with that. Syriac, for example, is a Christian dialect of Aramaic (eastern Aramaic) and was once spoken and written from Palestine all the way to India. To this day there are Christians still speaking Aramaic in Syrian villages like Ma'lula.

What has always impressed me is that the Kurdish language has survived under millennia of onslaught from powerhouse languages like Aramaic and Arabic.

Syriac, for example, is a Christian dialect of Aramaic

Yes, but it says "mainly," not "exclusively," and I think "mainly a Jewish language" is a fair summary of its post-Achaemenid history.

Yes, but it says "mainly," not "exclusively," and I think "mainly a Jewish language" is a fair summary of its post-Achaemenid history.
Post-Achaemenid and pre-Christian, yes. But the article omits the Christian-Syriac part in general, which, when it comes to history of Aramaic, is a big ommission.
Note: I'm not trying to push any agenda here, just nitpicking :o)

Hey, there's nothing I like better than a good nitpick!

I'm just waiting for someone to spoonerise 'Turkish Kurds'.

I studied some Aramaic (Modern Assyrian) in one of my classes last semester. Very interesting language. I knew some Arabic before & Farsi (Kabuli Dialect) is my mother tongue, so the connections and the mapping fun was endless. Too bad we didn't have time to dive into too much of etymological history. We were too busy mapping Syntax & Phonology, not to complain though, I do love Syntax.

There seems to be a confusion about which Kurds she is referring too. Is there some group called Kurds that speaks Aramaic, along with the real Kurds who speak urdish or whatever? This sounds as confusing as "Albanian" and "Caucasian Albanians".

A thought on the nitpick about "mainly" and "exclusively" - surely Aramaic was the dominanat language in the whole area for the whole population, and this continued after most people in the area converted to Christianity during Roman times right up until the area converted to Arabic. Throughout that whole period Jewish speakers of the language would certainly have been a minority.

From what I know, Aramaic was more or less one of the dominant languages in the Middle East before Islam came on the scene. Also, the Aramaic that I studied a little was spoken mainly by the Christian Arabs of the Middle East.

Correction, Christian Arabs of Syria, Iraq and area. I don't know about Eygpt

There seems to be a confusion about which Kurds she is referring too.
Well, yes. It would be more fitting to refer to them as "Kurdistan Jews", Kurdistan being a geographical, not ethnic/linguistic designation.

Jim's comment on the relative numbers of Christian and Jewish speakers of Aramaic is quite correct. Today, speakers of Christian Neo-Aramaic dialects far outnumber speakers of Jewish dialects.

Aramaic, a language used by Middle-East Jews or Christians (or Muslims)...
To blur things a little bit more, we can have a look at the Samaritans. They are considered Jews by the State of Israel but not by the Jewish religious authorities. Their liturgical language is sometimes referred to as Samaritan Hebrew, sometimes as Samaritan Aramaic. And they have (or had) an alphabet of their own.

Boy, the Middle East gets more complicated every time I turn around! Thanks for all the information, everyone.

Does anyone know which dialect of Aramaic was used in Mel Gibson's Passion movie? An Arabic-speaking acquaintance of mine went to see it when it was in theaters, and I remember that he remarked with some surprise at how much of the Aramaic dialogue he was able to understand.

Whichever version it was, Mr Mcgee, I'm sure it wasn't kosher!

Boy, the Middle East gets more complicated every time I turn around!
Noone's brought them up yet, so I must resort to shameless self-promotion, all for the good of the assembled readership of LanguageHat :o) : there's also Mandaic, another dialect of Aramaic.

Siganus Sutor: good catch on the Samaritans.
As for their script, they basically retained the one originally used by all Israelites, see for example the Siloe/Siloam inscription.
Samaritan Hebrew and Samaritan Aramaic are, naturally, two different languages (Rudolf Macuch wrote a grammar of both Samaritan Aramaic and Hebrew). As reported by Abram Firkovich, by the second half of the 19th century most Samaritans used Arabic language and script almost exclusively (even their names were Arabic). The little they wrote in Hebrew, however, they wrote in Samaritan script