Historical Village Toponyms as Cultural Memory: Linguistic Structure, Semantic Representation, and Cultural Landscape in Majapahit

Abstract

Historical place names preserve valuable evidence of the relationships among language, culture, and landscape, yet studies on Majapahit toponyms have generally examined linguistic form, historical documentation, or semantic meaning separately. This study investigates the linguistic characteristics and socio-cultural representations of 167 historical Majapahit village toponyms distributed across the Majapahit cultural landscape in East Java, Indonesia. Adopting an onomastic approach within the framework of linguistic anthropology, the study integrates qualitative interpretation with reproducible corpus-based analysis using the R programming language. Each toponym was classified according to linguistic structure, semantic category, cultural value, spatial representation, and their interrelationships. The findings indicate that most historical village names have been preserved in the contemporary administrative system as villages, hamlets, or districts, demonstrating strong historical continuity. Linguistically, simplex (47.31%) and single-word forms (74.85%) dominate the corpus, whereas compound and affixed forms provide greater semantic specificity. Semantically, flora (19.16%) represents the largest category, followed by cultural artifacts, hydrology, and social organization (11.38% each), reflecting the close relationship between settlement naming and environmental as well as socio-cultural contexts. Ecological values (33.53%) constitute the dominant cultural orientation, followed by social values (23.95%). Cross-analysis further reveals systematic relationships among linguistic structure, semantic categories, cultural values, and spatial representation, indicating that Majapahit village names formed an integrated naming system through which environmental knowledge, social organization, and cultural memory were encoded. These findings demonstrate that historical toponyms function not only as geographical identifiers but also as linguistic representations of the Majapahit cultural landscape, contributing to broader discussions in historical onomastics, linguistic anthropology, and cultural landscape studies.