Background. The success of an open source software (OSS) project requires effective communication among its members. Given that OSS projects often have established social status systems, much communication may happen between individuals of different statuses, particularly, elite developers who have project management privileges and ordinary project contributors. Since sociolinguistics literature and our prior work have found that groups in different status would be likely develop different language styles, which may hinder critical cross-status communication, and hereby influence the project’s outcomes. Objectives. We seek to develop an understanding of cross-status communication, as well as its impacts on an OSS project’s outcomes in terms of productivity and quality. The anticipated results describe the linguistic similarities and differences of cross-status communication and reveal the relationships between these linguistic similarities and differences and project outcomes. Method. We approach the above research objectives with the language style matching (LSM) tool which measures the similarities of cross-status communication in multiple language style features. For each sampled project, we first dynamically identify elite developers having project administration privileges. Then, we capture the cross-status communication between elite and non-elite developers; and calculate the LSM features of these two group of individuals. The LSM variables, together with project outcomes, will be used to fit regression models to analyze potential relationships between cross-status communication and project outcomes. Limitations. The study has several limitations. First, it considers project hosted on GITHUB only. Second, to ensure data availability, our sample is drawn from top projects, thus may not be able to represent all projects. Third, we only consider a limited number of linguistic variables.