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It depends on what you call thinking. Logical, etc. abstract “higher” thinking, of course, will not work without language – but nevertheless, the little animals have a certain intelligence and, to the best of their abilities, still think and solve urgent problems. Visually-figuratively and concretely, but nevertheless.
Each item, or property, or action-has a name, well, or a name.
By means of Language (speech apparatus), a person calls everything that exists around him “by its proper name”.
If you take away this “Language” from a person, then everything around you does not have “its own name”. There will be nothing to think about, because nothing is named after itself.
Thinking is a function of consciousness. Conscious thinking is secondary, language is primary.
Unconscious functions will remain: instincts, reflexes. If we call them non-conscious thinking, then Thinking is primary, and Language is secondary.
In general, the appearance of such a question is quite logical. Elucidation of the degree and nature of the connection between language and thinking is one of the central problems of theoretical linguistics and philosophy of language from the very beginning of their development. Deep discrepancies are found in the solution of this problem — from direct identification of language and thinking (Schleiermacher, Hamann) or their excessive convergence with exaggeration of the role of language (Humboldt, behaviorism, neo-Humboldtianism, neo-positivism) to denial of a direct connection between them (Benecke) or, more often, ignoring thinking in the methodology of linguistic research (linguistic formalism, descriptivism).
To answer this question, let's turn to the concept of thinking, and more specifically, to its types. In psychology, it is customary to distinguish types of thinking by content. There are: practically-effective thinking, which is genetically the earliest type of thinking, in which actions with objects are of decisive importance (in its rudimentary form, it is also observed in animals) and which consists in the fact that problem solving is carried out by real transformation of the situation and performing a motor act; on the basis of practically-effective thinking, there is a new type of thinkingvisual-figurative, which is characterized by operating with visual images in the mind and which is based on images of representations, the transformation of the situation into a plan of images; a feature of abstract (verbal-logical) thinking is that it occurs based on a concept, judgment, without using empirical data. There are other types of thinking, but we will not consider them, because already on the basis of these types of thinking, we can conclude that thinking is not always based on language (although слов the leading role in mental activity is played by verbal-logical thinking, let's recall the words�Rene Descartes: “I think, so I exist“).Language is the direct material support of thinking only in its verbal-logical form.Thus, мыш thinking appeared before language.�
An interesting study by New Zealand professor Michael Corballis, who claims that the human thinking abilities that made the existence of language possible, initially have a non-linguistic nature. That is, we don't need to speak any language, even our native language, to start thinking. However, this statement refutes a number of linguistic theories that have many followers. For example, Noam Chomsky's theory that everyone has an innate ability to speak a particular language. Chomsky argued that our thinking is initially formed as a language, and the structures that each person thinks with are easily transformed into lexical units (that is, words) and grammatical constructions (that is, ways of connecting these words). As proof of his theory, Chomsky cited the indisputable fact that young children learn their native language incredibly easily and that regardless of the type of language, they make approximately the same mistakes. Despite the fact that many people talk about the” Chomskian revolution ” in linguistics, Chomsky's generativism is constantly criticized.