I have heard folks say "warsh , sawr ,airier(area), favre.
Ok,so that last one i’m just funnin’, but why do they do this? Is it regional or whart?
Regional.
I grew up in central PA and learned to say it that way. My first-grade teacher was not impressed when I raised my hand to correct the way she had spelled “wash” on the blackboard. (I got better).
Friends from Illinois also put the extra R.
I live near our nation’s capital now and can’t say I’ve heard that R in many years.
That’s one I don’t understand. I can understand dropping an R, like with the Boston accent, because it’s actually a little easier to say “cah” or “numbuh” than “car” or “number”, but I can’t understand why someone would ADD an R to make the word MORE difficult to say.
A common mistake you can spot all over the SDMB in all kinds of debates.
You assume that everything people do is chosen. Sometimes we’re just creatures of Herd & Habit.
WAG that just popped into my head: With ‘wash’ the mouth is opened a bit, and then it needs to close and the tongue needs to be reshaped. ISTM that some people may have had some trouble making the transition and it ended up as an r-sound, and eventually a regional accent. As for the other words, I don’t know.
(Man, it’s hard to compose a message when your coworker is trying to engage you in conversation!)
Total WAG, but perhaps it dates back to British rule and has something to do with the way the British (specifically a London accent, I think?) pronunciations of both short AW and AR/OR sounds are very similar. (War, door, water, fort, wash, etc.)
But “wash” in a southern English accent is pronounced “wosh”, to rhyme with “posh”. There’s no “a” vowel there at all.
My dad says it that way. He grew up in Detroy-it.
My dad grew up in Iowa…he says “warsh” and has a hard time pronouncing “aluminum.”
I think Mindfield is close. The /r/ started out as coloring of the vowel after a [w]. [W] has a funny effect on following vowels in English. Compare:
bar car far war
charm farm harm warm
barn tarn warn
For the /sh/ after a short /a/, we have:
bash cash crash dash gash hash mash etc., and wash.
I know the /a/ before /r/ isn’t the same as the /a/ before /sh/, but in both cases the [w] does something different to its short /a/. In this case, I suspect it caused an r-colored vowel, which in turn became a real /r/. In contrast, it may have been rhotacism, where the /sh/ sound morphed into something that would cause an /r/ to show up.
And I can remember my older relatives from Central Ohio doing this.
Here in Boston they classic accent frequently drops the “R” in the middle of a word.
“I Pahked my Cah in Hahvahd Yahd”
or, as happened to me:
"It’s on Weston Road
I can’t find it.
It’s right on the map – Weston.
Weston? W-E-S-T-O-N?
No, Weston. W - E - S - T - E - Ah - N."
I figure they save up all those dropped "R"s and use they at the ends of words that don’t have them, like “Saw”
“I Sawr him”
This lets you distinguish between the tool and the past tense of “See”.
Although I confess that I still don’t understand “Seen”, as in “I Seen him, too.”
My grandmother grew up in Rochester, NY. She used “warsh.”
Oddly enough, my mother, who also grew up in Rochester, or nearby, doesn’t use that pronunciation.
This last part is odd. I’ve lived in Northen Virginia my whole life and I grew up saying “Warshingon” and “warsh”. When I first heard people saying it without the r, probably about 15 year ago or so, it sounded very strange to me. One thing I have noticed, is that I hear it a lot less now than I did back then. I’d tended to attribute that to the large influx of people from all over during the dot com explosion in the Dulles Coridor.
As for why it’s said, I’ll let the experts or wikipedia explain the origins, it just feels easier to say. It intuitively feels like a slight slur because the r sound is kind of between that ah and sh formations… at least how I pronounce them.
FWIW, a little bit of effort has generally “fixed” that bit of my speech, though I still pop the r in it from time to time.
I lived in Ohio until first grade. We all said ‘warsh.’ I’ve since stopped saying it, I think my sister still does. We had a joke that ‘warshing’ something got it cleaner than ‘washing’ it.
I live in Washington State and have no idear why some folks pronounce it Warshington.
My Dutch grandma said “warsh” and also took out the “thrash.”
I’m from Ohio. My family’s dialect was to say wash as “woish”. When in high school, we trained ourselves to “wahsh” (“ah” being the same vowel in cot and caught) to match what we heard on TV. The local dialect varied among “wahsh”, “warsh” and “woish”.
A word that is pronounced similarly is war. I say it as “wor”, as do most people I know, even here in California.
Other interesting pronunciations I grew up with:
mature: natively “mator”, now I say “machur”
perfect: “perfek”, now “perfekt”
ancient: “ainchent”, now more like “ainshent”
what: “wut”, becoming “hwut”
And the infamous nuclear: “nucular” vs “nucleear” (I still say the former, because my PhD in physics beats your prestige dialect. 
)
I know someone who can’t pronounce “aluminum” at ALL.
The “warsh” probably comes from the same school of thought that puts a “B” in “Baptist” rendering it “Bab-tist.”
I’m from near DC, and I put in the r, and so do both my parents, and I’ve heard many people in DC/Baltimore put in 'r’s on words like “wash”.
Here in Southern Indiana:
You go acrost the street.
You measure the length, width and heigth.
There’s one pacificguy I had in mind for the job.
You warsh your truck.
You buy a can of pop.
They put your groceries in a sack.