The American National Corpus includes written and spoken (i.e., transcriptions) materials that fulfill the following requirements:
- The materials must have been originally produced in or after the year 1990.
- The author(s)/speaker(s) must be native speakers of American English (Who qualifies as a native speaker of American English?)
- The contributor(s) must own the copyright to the materials, or the materials must be in the public domain (see Copyright issues).
- Individual documents should contain no fewer than 1000 words.
- Documents should consist primarily of language data–i.e., we do not want documents that contain mostly tables, formulas, images, etc.
If you have any doubt or questions about the suitability of your contribution, please do not hesitate to contact us and we will get back to you right away.
We may choose not to include a document in the corpus at all if there is some doubt that the author is a native speaker of American English, or if we are unable, for technical reasons, to extract meaningful information from the documents (see Format).