<![CDATA[Place names are more than administrative labels. They retain traces of settlement, migration, and contact between speech communities, and they shift as those communities shift. Indonesian toponymic research has grown quickly over the past decade, yet border municipalities formed through recent administrative expansion remain thinly documented, and few studies bring etymological reconstruction, cultural classification, and spatial analysis together within a single design. This article addresses that gap by examining twenty-one of the twenty-five villages of Banjar City, a young municipality located directly on the boundary between West Java and Central Java. Qualitative description is combined with frequency counts, drawing on interviews with community figures and residents, field observation, archival and cartographic records, and a toponym corpus compiled from Sundanese, Javanese, Kawi, and Sanskrit lexicographic sources. Polymorphemic names dominate the corpus, accounting for 17 of 21 names or 81%, and sari is the most productive bound element with nine occurrences. Socio-historical motivation accounts for 13 names or 62%, a pattern consistent with plantation era labour migration from Central Java and with later village formation under municipal expansion. Physical features continue to shape naming more strongly than non-physical ones, yet they do so mainly within the older settlement cores. The study contributes in two ways. It documents a border city toponymic system that has not previously been described, and it argues that toponymic stratification in contact zones is better understood as layered coexistence than as replacement, since older ecological names and newer evaluative names occupy distinct portions of the same municipal space instead of succeeding one another.]]>
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