As others have mentioned, there are two possible plurals that are generally considered “correct".
- One of them is regularly formed using the English plural suffix -(e)s: statuses.
- The other is taken from Latin: status.
It’s not objectively better to use the Latinate plural form, or to try to pronounce it similarly to the way the Romans did. Status has been an English word, not just a Latin word, for a long time now. The Latinate plural is rarely used in English.
To me, it seems simpler to just go with the regular English plural statuses, but if you prefer to use the Latinate plural status for whatever reason, you’ll have to make some additional choices about pronunciation (it doesn't seem obvious to me how to pronounce it).
Pronunciation notes
In Latin, the singular of this word was pronounced something like [ˈstatus] or [ˈstatʊs], and the plural was pronounced [ˈstatuːs].
English doesn’t have the same sounds as Latin, so people don’t pronounced borrowed Latin words with their original pronunciations. (Some people try harder than others, but even the people who try to do this generally only approximate Latin vowel sounds with the closest English ones.)
In English, the pronunciation of the singular form of status is always anglicized to a large degree. There are two main variants:
- “STATE-us”, phonemic transcription: /ˈsteɪtəs/, phonetic transcriptions of some common pronunciations in various accents: [ˈsteɪtəs], [ˈsteɪɾəs]
- “STAT-us”, phonemic transcription: /ˈstætəs/, phonetic transcriptions of some common pronunciations in various accents: [ˈstætəs], [ˈstæɾəs], [ˈstatəs]
The plural statuses is just pronounced as the singular with [ɪz] or [əz] stuck on the end. The plural status is rare enough that it’s not clear how people usually pronounce it. I think it’s safe to assume that in the first syllable, people will use the same vowel sound as in the first syllable of the singular. But the pronunciation of the second syllable is less obvious.
/tjuːs/ "tyooce": t + "long u"
The Oxford English Dictionary transcribes the pronunciation of plural status as "/ˈsteɪtjuːs/" (with a note that it is "rare"). However, there are several other pronunciations that seem likely.
/tʃuːs/ "chooce": yod coalescence
A process in English called yod-coalescence ("yod" refers to the "y" sound at the start of "yes," written /j/ in IPA) has affected many words with the sequence /tj/. Before an unstressed vowel, this consonant cluster has changed to /tʃ/ (the "ch" sound of "cheek") for most speakers. For example, consider the common pronunciations of statute /ˈstætʃuːt/, stature /ˈstætʃər/, and nature /ˈneɪtʃər/. This suggests that for some people, an original /ˈsteɪtjuːs/ might end up being pronounced as /ˈsteɪtʃuːs/.
/tuːs/ "tooce": yodless "long u"
In some words from Latin, such as gubernatorial, people tend to pronounce “long u” as /uː/ (an “oo” sound) rather than the more usual English /juː/ (a “you” sound). You can see from Greg Bacon’s answer that tchrist equated statūs with "statoose", a spelling that suggests the English pronunciation /ˈstætuːs/ or /ˈsteɪtuːs/.
/təs/? "tuss": closed-syllable shortening
Another complication arises when we consider the general rule of English pronunciation that gives a short value to a vowel in a closed syllable (a syllable that ends in a consonant), regardless of the vowel’s quality in Latin. For example, the Latin word jūs “law” was pronounced in Latin with a “long u” (/juːs/) but its traditional pronunciation in English uses a “short u”: “juss” /dʒʌs/.
It's true there are a number of exceptions to this rule in words from Latin; the largest class is words ending in -es /iːz/ (which includes many fairly commonly used plural forms of words ending in -is, -ix or -ex, such as axis/axes, matrix/matrices, and index/indices). However, the pronunciation of -es has another irregularity that adds some uncertainty: it not only has a “long e” vowel, but the final “s” is pronounced as the voiced consonant /z/, rather than as voiceless /s/.
However, using /əs/ for the plural form "status" doesn't seem to be supported by any authorities.
##Similar words## Some other words that inflected in the same way in Latin are apparatus, coitus, fetus, flatus, hiatus, impetus, meatus.
