"Strongly held belief" would suggest authority on the subject, but I suspect this is not the case. By comparison, while I accept the efficacy of vaccines on the authority of the authors of scientific texts on immunology and draw on circumstantial information to infer probable reliability of said authorities, I wouldn't say I have a "strongly held belief" either as this would suggest that I, personally, have authority on the subject, which I don't. My knowledge, as descriptively rich as it might be, nonetheless rests on a chain of authority.
In any case, the first problem in these discussions is the superficial notion of "language" that's often employed. "Language", as a system of signs, entails signification, and the kind of signification human language engages in is not merely a degree removed from the kind of signification other animals engage in. There is a difference in kind. There is a big difference between a distress call and expressing the proposition "There are five red berries in the tall bush". A distress call requires no abstract concepts; the latter proposition requires five. While we can say there is something like or analogous to syntactic structure in a distress call or some series of joined calls, none of these require concepts. And abstraction of concepts is the most central and unique faculty of rationality, as it is by means of concepts that we can reason about the world. They are the seat of intentionality, not mere imagism.