This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on the Finite-State-Methods and Natural Language Processing, FSMNLP 2009. The workshop was held at the University of Pretoria, South Africa on July 2009. In total 21 papers were submitted and of those papers 13 were accepted as regular papers and a further 6 as extended abstracts. The papers are devoted to computational morphology, natural language processing, finite-state methods, automata, and related formal language theory.