Using "non-" to prefix a two-word phrase - English Language & Usage ...

At the linguistics conference, there were no / not / non- native speakers of Esperanto. They're all grammatically "valid", but they all mean different things - and pragmatically / idiomatically, only the no version is likely to be used.

What is the correct way to apply the prefix "non-" to negate a (maybe dashed) compound adjective? Suppose that we want to negate a generic compound adjective " adjective1 adjective2 ". In this case: "non- adjective1 adjective2 " looks a bit ambiguous since the scope of the prefix "non-" is at least unclear (in fact seems to affect only adjective1).

Except "non" is not an English word, it is a prefix of Latin origin. Which is why American style manuals will always ask you to merge it with the subsequent word, without a hyphen. British rules differ, and the "non-" construction is frequently found in the literature.

hyphenation - Is the use of a hyphen between "non" and an adjective ...

To record and summarize the discussion in the comments, while the OED mostly uses the hyphen, many other dictionaries don't, and the ngrams show higher non-hyphenated usage than hyphenated.