I read "Speech! How language made us human" by Simon Prentis, in which he explores some ways in which language affects what kind of animal a person is.
We can dismiss the idea that language is the actual stuff of thought, the thing the brain uses to think: My mum's typical sentence proves it utterly "Where did I put the thingy, you know, the whatsit".
She clearly thinking of a thing without knowing the word for it, so words aren't the base unit for thought.
Yet language is also clearly the thing which gives us such a deep and rich culture, and he is entertaining and enlightening as he goes though what some of that means.
He's really optimistic in the final pages, that our international agreement and commitment to law and human rights - a thing borne by language - can bring about some approximation of world peace.
Course, it was written before the start of world war 3 in 2022. Will we be able to talk ourselves out of it escalating? Or will we talk ourselves into another final catastrophic global meltdown?
That's the thing about language I guess. Could argue either side.