Since CD is not my area, I cant help you with a general set of recommendations but I do know that we here at the University of Cincinnati have a very strong Department of Communications Disorders. Their head was a student of mine when she was working on her Ph D. If you wish to contact them, email me privately and Ill help you get in touch.

- If you want to be a speech therapist or an audiologist, then you should look at the ASHA website http://www.asha.org/ (American Speech Language and Hearing Association) which describes the preparation for those professions, including college work and certification requirements.

- If you want to be a teacher, then you'll need to make sure that the college you attend (or graduate school) will prepare you for the certification as a teacher of the deaf. Most of the certifying programs are at the masters level, so you need a solid undergraduate degree in something (math, science, English, social studies - what do you want to teach?).

- If you want to be a counselor, some universities offer degrees with specializations that might be more appropriate, although any kind of psychology, or rehabilitation, vocational counseling could be appropriate.

- If you want to be a sign language interpreter, there are over 100 colleges in North American which offer 2 year degrees, but even better, a few offer 4 year degrees in interpreting. There are a handful which grant masters' degrees in this emerging field. I'd suggest that a strong bachelor's degree with an interpreting speciality would be good preparation for a career. (The concern I have with a 2 year degree is that you may feel frustrated in making the transition from college to work, that your preparation is not sufficient to get you to a satisfying level of proficiency and knowledge, and thus that you'd drop out without having really made a good effort at the work.)

- From my perspective as a linguist with sign language as my specialty, I'd say that for any of these other professions a strong language base in American Sign Language will serve you and the children you work with well. There are a number of linguists who specialize in sign language acquisition by deaf children. Their primary work is teaching at the college level, but their research work is conducted with deaf children.

Again, the question is what you're especially interested in and what ambitions you have. Depending on where you're living now and how close to college age you are, you may be nearby some linguists or sign language specialists who could give you more specifics. If you'd like to write back, I'll try to put you in touch with someone appropriate.

For information about the varius linguistics programs at universities in this country and Canada, contact the Linguistic Society of America at zzlsa@bitnet.net and ask for the most recent version of the "Guide to Linguitic Programs...:"
A new version is supposed to appear on the world wide web soon, but maybe you don't have time to wait.

Secondly, you say you are 'fascinated by how ... languages work, their respective structures, and what separates one from the other.' This sounds very familiar; it was approximately that kind of interest that led me to pursue an advanced degree in linguistics. Given this attitude of yours, I believe you would do well to enter a graduate program that at the very least made it feasible for you to take some courses in both comparative (and probably historical) linguistics and in general (by which I mean cross-linguistic) grammatical theory. You should probably ask yourself where your interests lie with regard to the languages of the world. You mention that you have a BA in French and have started studying Spanish; this suggests an orientation toward the Romance languages. However, you also mention interest in Hindi, an Indo-European language only very distantly related to Romance, and Arabic, which isn't even Indo-European. I sense a rather eclectic bunch of interests. The question I see that you should ask yourself is, Should you aim at a program concentrating on one or more of the Romance languages but with a heavy dollop of linguistics thrown in, or should you aim at a linguistics program with the intention of pursuing your specific interests wherever they may lead, whether into further Romance studies or comparative Indo-European or Papua New Guinea?

I think in your case I can at least tentatively offer a recommendation of the program at my alma mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. They have a very good linguistics department; its only defects, to my mind are: (1) it has very little in the way of an undergraduate program and (2) in large part for that reason it has very little to offer in the way of teaching experience for its graduate students. But its faculty is topnotch, with a pretty independent attitude towards matters of theory or allegiance to any theoretical school. Also, the University library has one of the largest collections around, which is of course very convenient. More particularly relevant to your interests, I would note that Hindi and Arabic are both taught at UIUC under the aegis of the linguistics department; I myself took two years of Hindi while working on my master's degree there, and I believe they have recently hired a new Arabicist. The UIUC linguistics department also has a very healthy relationship with the Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese department (which given its scope should really be called the `Romance minus French' department), some of whose faculty have good, solid grounding in general linguistics and occasionally offer courses in comparative Romance linguistics. I'm afraid relations between the linguistics and French departments are not as cordial, though I didn't encounter much trouble the one time I approached some people in the French dept. looking for help on a research paper.

One could generalize and say that the goal of most modern linguistics in this country is a characterization of human linguistic ability and an explanation of the language acquisition process. This is not the same thing as studying, say, Arabic because you're interested in that language and culture. If you haven't yet taken a course in linguistics, do so as soon as possible, perhaps as a special student, before enrolling in a program. I've seen a number of people go from language majors into linguistics only to discover that they don't really want what linguistics programs have to offer.

But linguistics is a broad, amorphous field, and linguistics programs do vary widely. If you're careful, you can get training in almost any subject related to language. Beyond the basics, you might find linguists focusing on applied concerns like second language learning or speech deficits, or on sociolinguistic interests like language policy or dialects and education. Some linguists, particularly in historical linguistics (language change) do still study one language or a family of languages because they're interested in those languages and cultures.

Depending on what you really want to do, you would want to choose one program over another. If you're not interested in language in the abstract, be careful to choose a program that allows you to take an anthropological, historical, or sociolinguistic focus. Also, some programs are fairly tightly structured, while others permit you to craft your own program, sometimes across departments (combining psychology and linguistics, literature and linguistics, anthroplogy and linguistics...). There's a lot of homework you need to do before you make a decision.

As for careers, there aren't a lot of positions either in French or in linguistics these days. That may change in the next ten years, as the baby boomers start to retire. One possible solution is to make yourself marketable on both sides, so that you might be eligible for a linguistics position, as well as for a more general job in a French department (some familiarity with the Caribbean or Africa would make you a highly desirable candidate there).

"The language instinct" Steven Pinker
"The language lottery" David Lightfoot
There are lots of others, but those are pretty general and should give you more of an idea.

Second, as far as good graduate programs, this really depends on what KIND of linguistics interests you. I'd bet you're being bombarded with all sorts of opinions on this, but the fundamental question is still what interests you have within linguistics.

If you want a career, I'm sure there are college degrees, vocational diplomas, apprenticeships, in your area, that you can pursue now or later. University should be a more explorative enterprise, where you can frolic in large and fascinating fields of knowledge, where you can shape and refine your thinking about who you are and what your social/political/cultural roles should be, and where you can start to sort out some of the big questions of life. Linguistics can help, because language is one of the clearest separating lines between humans and the other animals; it is intensely private (we think with it),and profoundly social (we bridge to others with it). But so can philosophy, literature, history, mathematics, biology, political science. Go to university to broaden yourself, not narrow yourself.

As for the more practical question you asked (the mutual usefulness of a double major in political science and historical linguistics), there aren't any particularly strong links between the two fields that suggest themselves to me (mathematics and linguistics or psychology and linguistics or computer science and linguistics are more natural double-majors), but if you love them both you'll find them informing each other regularly.

I decided to become a linguist for two reasons. First, I love languages and have always beeen fascinated by them. Second, by studying the structure of languages we are studying something about the structure of the human mind, which to me is a fascinating thing for us to be doing. In general, I think that what makes linguistics so interesting, and also often difficult, is that we are studying ourselves -- we are exploring an important part of what it means to be human. Language is such an integral part of being human.