Consciousness surely does not depend on language. Babies, many animals, and patients robbed of speech by brain damage are not insensate robots; they have reactions like ours that indicate that someone's home.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Language is one component of the human cognitive capacity which happens to be fairly amenable to enquiry. So we know a good deal about that.
Once we have learned to read, meaning of words can somehow register without consciousness.
Humans are crude linguists from the moment of birth - and perhaps even in the womb - to the extent at least that we can hear spoken sounds and begin to recognize different combinations of language sounds.
Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world.
Language is handy, but we humans have social and emotional connections that transcend words and are communicated - and understood - without conscious thought.
Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.
But behavior in the human being is sometimes a defense, a way of concealing motives and thoughts, as language can be a way of hiding your thoughts and preventing communication.
It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection.
Scientists attach great importance to the human capacity for spoken language. But we also have a parallel track of nonverbal communication, which may reveal more than our carefully chosen words, and sometimes be at odds with them.
Language comes first. It's not that language grows out of consciousness, if you haven't got language, you can't be conscious.