Disinformation has emerged as one of the most pressing challenges within digital media and social networking environments. While a substantial body of research has addressed fake news and disinformation from, communicative, and technological perspectives, the role of language in the production, legitimization, and effectiveness of disinformation has received comparatively limited systematic attention. This article conceptualizes disinformation as a linguistic and discursive phenomenon and examines its operation through the combined lens of language-based approaches and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). First, the article clarifies key conceptual distinctions between disinformation, misinformation, and fake news, emphasizing the importance of intentionality and discursive organization. It then provides a critical review of international and Persian-language scholarship, identifying four major research strands: macro-level non-linguistic approaches, computational and data-driven studies, language-based analyses, and critical discourse-analytic research. Building on this review, the article proposes a theoretical framework that integrates language-based analysis with CDA to overcome the limitations of each approach in isolation. Drawing on the language-based framework developed in The Language of Fake News and a secondary analysis of a well-documented case study, the article demonstrates how linguistic features such as information density, certainty marking, and source attribution contribute to the construction of credibility in disinformation texts. These findings are reinterpreted within a CDA perspective to show how linguistic choices are embedded in broader relations of power, ideology, and media authority. The article concludes by outlining methodological limitations and proposing directions for future research, emphasizing the need for empirically grounded, language-sensitive studies of disinformation in Persian media contexts.