In The Origins of Unhappiness, David Smail touches on the importance of language as a tool for making sense of our experience. He explains that control of language (by distal powers, through education, media, etc.) to a large extent controls thought. People cannot reason about nor come to terms with things they can’t describe. It’s difficult to comprehend ways of thinking that exist outside of the subset of language they have available to them.
Later in the book, he elaborates on this with an example which demonstrates that it is not only the the words themselves that are required, but also the authority to apply them to our experience.
But before [Steve] could voice such criticisms, he had to be, so to speak, offered a language in which to do so. It wasn't, of course, that he literally didn't know the words, but rather that he had not been accorded the authority to apply them to his experience in the way that the psychologist was suggesting.