[_emacsomancer_]

By "that's how languages form", I assume you mean something like "standardized languages", which then becomes somewhat circular, because it's certainly not how languages form generally (and even standardized languages can form without mass media, and certainly did, even pre-writing).

That's also not how standard French formed. Standardized French is Parisian French, so just the 'dialect' of the politically-important centre. Not too dissimilar to Latin (which was originally narrowly the dialect of Rome) in that.

Whatever the propaganda, China still contains a number of non-mutually intelligible (though related) languages, but of course Mandarin enjoys much prominence and has an enormous number of speakers.