This book contains the revised papers presented at the 8th Amsterdam Colloquium 2011, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in December 2011. The 46 thoroughly refereed and revised contributions out of 137 submissions presented together with 2 invited talks are organized in five sections. The first section contains the invited contributions. The second, third and fourth sections incorporate submitted contributions to the three thematic workshops that were hosted by the colloquium and addressed the following topics, inquisitiveness, formal semantics and pragmatics of sign languages, formal semantic evidence. The final section presents the submitted contributions to the general program.