"There is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a depth of formless feeling untouched by thought." - Rilke
Your assertion that we don't think in language is questionable. It runs counter to the lived experience of developing thoughts through writing ("writing isn't capturing thinking -- it is thinking"). I believe there is more to thought than language alone, but I also feel quite sure that language forms an essential part of thinking beyond a base layer of instinctive animalistic associations. Sophisticated thoughts are impossible to construct or maintain in the absence of language to represent concepts.
Edt to add: I cited Rilke because I find the notion [some deep thoughts are beyond language] interesting. But I disagree with the idea that language is only ever epiphenomenal (co-occurring with thought), or akin to a hard-of-hearing scribe attempting to convey thoughts which always have independent existence.
This is true and it's barely even debatable. Whatever exact role language plays in our thought processes, it is most definitely nonzero.
It's why I think "LLMs are only fancy autocorrect" style takes are really underselling how wild it is that we've, in a roundabout way, sort of crystallized a bit of the human thought process in a way that is genuinely useful for a lot of tasks.
Linguistic Relativity — John Lucy https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev.anthro.26....
Russian Blues Reveal Effects of Language on Color Discrimination https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0701644104
Unconscious Effects of Language-Specific Terminology on Pre-Attentive Color Perception https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0811155106
Newly Trained Lexical Categories Produce Lateralized Categorical Perception of Color https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1005669107