This is my preferred answer to the Fermi question as well. Unless two civilisations are in a precise (and likely small) window where they both can and want to communicate, it's likely the less advanced one wouldn't even recognise the other one. Especially if the other one doesn't "want" to be recognised.
Language (in the sense of "use of language appears around 100,000 years ago") is not the only way to communicate information, and many animal species are perfectly capable of communicating information despite not having evolved what is being called "language" in this sense.
In general, pre-writing human oral culture seems to have dynamics much in common with such abilities in other animals. Barring error correction mechanisms, oral knowledge can degrade in transmission, limiting its reach and success.
This isn’t to say human language doesn’t have its distinctive features that are very useful. But the language came from a different brain, and is suited to the particularity of our brains. We should hesitate to place solely on language something that’s also driven by us having more things to say.
The language itself is a a human invention, and a product of how our brains are wired. However, there's a dialectical process here where the language shapes us in turn, and both our minds and our language evolve together. The reason we have more things to say stems from us accumulating knowledge and expanding out horizons through the use of our language.