Analytical social sciences working with multilingualism often try to formalise the decision-making processes faced by speakers. A common tool is the concept of the communicative value (or Q-value; de Swaan 1993, 2001), which is also regularly adopted by economists, stating that the utility of using a particular language correlates positively with the numbers of speakers. While subsequent discussions on this matter have emphasised the importance of bilingual or plurilingual identities over strictly monolingual categorisations of interactions (e.g. Minett & Wang 2008; Templin 2019), the concepts of language and speakerhood are not commonly discussed outside of linguistic circles. This fact leads to open debates about the applicability of formalised and abstract models on language choice (cf. Grin 2021), and observations that leads critical sociolinguists to question the notion of a comparative communicative value, e.g. speaking Korean would correspond to lower communicative value than Bengali, despite its relative popularity. In order to account for these discrepancies between theory and observations, models have been amended to cover socio-economic status and “prestige”, yet without formulating how the latter can be operationalised. This paper discusses approaches in the literature and proposes a formalisation of linguistic prestige that allows to describe and analyse dynamic processes of value ascription based on linguistic identity, relative status of the speakers, and general status variables falling under the remit of the concept of communicative value. As this approach draws from theories and models accepted in the social sciences, it aims to bridge the methodological divide between sociolinguistics, sociology, and economics, and offer tools for interdisciplinary, quantitative language policy analyses.