Philology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary criticism, history, and linguistics. It is more commonly defined as the study of literary texts and written records, the establishment of their authenticity and their original form, and the determination of their meaning. A person who pursues this kind of study is known as a philologist. Any classical language can be philologically studied, and, indeed, describing a language as "classical" is to imply the existence of a philological tradition associated with it.