I've thought about this before, and the thought experiment went something like this:

Q: What is the nature of thoughts, are they based on language and learned concepts?

1. Assume the hypothesis: thoughts are based on language.

2. Try to prove the inverse: In order to show that thought is NOT based on thought, I need at least one example of a thought that I can have without needing to articulate it within my head. Plenty of examples came to mind. I can have the thought of being hungry, without needing to say: "I am hungry" within my head. In my sleep, I am experiencing my thoughts without articulating them. Imagination and memory, specifically sensory details, are forms of thoughts that I DO NOT need to articulate within my mind.

3. Analyze the results: There are some thoughts that can come to me without needing to articulate them. These thoughts seem to be fundamental in some way such as hungry, tired, horny, ect. to all life on earth. And indeed, if you've ever had a pet, and you've looked at them as a living being, not just a "dumb animal", then you could observe that they do have thoughts, just as we do. We just have this nasty habit of putting things in boxes, such as thoughts in a worded context.

3.1: Furthermore, you can extrapolate from this thought experiment that we do not think exclusively with our brain. When I am hungry, the thought originates from a chemical imbalance in my stomach, not my brain. If I put my finger on a hotplate, the thought of pain originated from the nerves in my finger. Even if my brain interprets the signal and sends a reactionary response to move my finger, the input to the brain comes from the finger initially. If I was to cut off my finger and then place it on a hot plate, I would not feel/ think of pain. This shows that our entire body takes part in creating a whole "thought", which is actually more like a specific state of our body.

1. Account for exceptions: What about those thoughts that need to be articulated? When I'm free-styling over a beat or creating poetry, there is very little reality involved in the content that I am saying. But they make sense, in the sense that they aren't just a random compilation of sound. This implies that we have some mechanisms within our body which help us select words and then compile them into strings of words that "make sense". These mechanisms are language, but they must also in some way or another be stored within our body too. Perhaps a long chemical chain that reacts with only some inputs and processes them into these predetermined, logical word chains.