Abstract. We give an analog of the Myhill-Nerode methods from formal language theory for hypergraphs and use it to derive the following results for two NP-hard hypergraph problems.• We provide an algorithm for testing whether a hypergraph has cutwidth at most k that runs in linear time for constant k. In terms of parameterized complexity theory, the problem is fixed-parameter linear parameterized by k.• We show that it is not expressible in monadic second-order logic whether a hypergraph has bounded (fractional, generalized) hypertree width. The proof leads us to conjecture that, in terms of parameterized complexity theory, these problems are W[1]-hard parameterized by the incidence treewidth (the treewidth of the incidence graph).Thus, in the form of the Myhill-Nerode theorem for hypergraphs, we obtain a method to derive linear-time algorithms and to obtain indicators for intractability for hypergraph problems parameterized by incidence treewidth.In an appendix, we point out an error and a fix to the proof of the MyhillNerode theorem for graphs in Downey and Fellow's book on parameterized complexity. * A preliminary version of this article appeared in the proceedings of ISAAC 2013 [44]. This extended and revised version contains the full proof details, more figures, and corollaries to make the application of the Myhill-Nerode theorem for hypergraphs easier in an algorithmic setting. Moreover, it provides a fix to the proof of the Myhill-Nerode theorem for graphs in the books of Downey and Fellows [14,15]