After doing a bit of programming, I've become quite curious on language design itself. I'm still a novice (I've been doing it for about a year), so the majority of my code pertains to only two fields (GUI design in Python and basic algorithms in C/C++). I have become intrigued with how the actual languages themselves are written. I mean this in both senses. Such as how it was literally written (ie, what language the language was written in). As well as various features like white spacing (Python) or object orientation (C++ and Python).

Where would one start learning how to write a language? What are some of the fundamentals of language design, things that would make it a "complete" language?