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