Reddit reviews Language Files: Materials for an Introduction to Language and Linguistics

From what I've heard, your best choice for an all-encompassing teach-yourself-linguistics book is the Language Files from Ohio State, which has a pretty big linguistics major.

If you want a more layman's introduction you can check out Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct. The guy did a lecture at my school just yesterday, and he's quite good at explaining sociolinguistic concepts in everyday language. His current shtick is on analyzing language use. You can see a pretty cool video (an illustrated form of an excerpt from his current lecture) on Youtube.

If you want to go deeper, you might want to find book lists from a particular university. My university doesn't offer its lists publicly, but Ohio State does.

With a few exceptions (computational and certain sorts of applied linguistics like SLP), most linguistics graduate programs don't have specific technical expectations for students coming in. I'd just ask around. If you're picking a grad school, unless there's a compelling reason to stay close to home, you shouldn't be afraid to explore around the country. You'll end up getting paid pretty much the same amount anywhere if you're a linguistics grad student. My own school, Cornell University, has a lot of historical linguistics going on, especially Indo-Europeanist stuff, which you might be inclined to do as an anthropologist.

Finally, OCW has an abundance of linguistics courses available. Follow along with a few of those, although know that linguistics itself is a very diverse field that I can most closely analogize to biology. If you're studying pragmatics and sociolinguistics, you may do extremely well without ever knowing how to read a phonetic waveform. Just poke around and see what you like.

Do all that, and you'll be quite well prepared, and put a paper and a couple conferences under your belt as an undergraduate (at least in the Northeast, there are a few public undergraduate research conferences) and you should be no less prepared than your run-of-the-mill grad school-destined linguistics student.

>increase my likelihood of getting hired abroad

Getting hired doing what? Where abroad?

Why do you want a minor in French? There are at least a few million other Haitians who are bilingual in French, so how are you bringing extra value to the marketplace with that minor? Wouldn't a Spanish/German/Russian/Chinese/etc. - Haitian bilingual be a rarer commodity?

This all really depends on where you want to go and what you want to do.

As for books:
My intro to ling. class used the book Language Files.
The Language Instinct is pretty good.
I really liked The Unfolding of Language.
The Power of Babel doesn't get too technical, but is an introduction to language change.

I'm not sure what you're saying here. If you're confused about linguistics, I suggest reading Language Files.

This is the book my Introduction to Linguistics class used. On the plus side, it's really accessible and explains a lot of the 'main' areas of linguistics fairly well. On the other hand, as a phonetics fiend even as a beginner, I was less than impressed by its representation of IPA (I was already fairly proficient in it from vocal training).

I also strongly suggest checking out university linguistics labs' research pages as the labs often post .pdfs of student and faculty research!

I recommend Language Files written by the faculty at the Ohio State University. It was my intro to linguistics book and it offers a very general yet thorough survey of all of the sub-fields of linguistics. It really is a fantastic book and I reference it frequently. Older editions will do if you are on a budget.

You could go Pinker, you could go Lagefoged, but really you're only going to be scratching the surface of very specific areas that way. Books like Pinker's are great for getting your mind wandering about language, though.