who's a native speaker?

[Erin McKean]

Folks  -- does anyone want to weigh in or point me towards sources
about who is or who isn't a "native speaker" of American English?

We're trying to hammer out guidelines for people who want to
contribute their online writing to the American National Corpus
project (http://americannationalcorpus.org).
Right now, for some published authors, we're taking birth in the US
or working/writing in the US for more than X amount of time. This
seems to work because this published writing is heavily edited by US
copyeditors, etc.

However, the same rule seems a little lax for online, unedited
American English, as it doesn't take into account home language or
anything like that. We don't want to be unduly restrictive, but at
the same time we don't want to get too much unrepresentative writing
in the corpus.

Again, this is for WRITTEN material, not spoken, which means that
there will be, I would hope, fewer issues than with near-native
spoken American English, even though it is very casual writing.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Erin McKean
editor at verbatimmag.com