It’s silent, like the P in bath.
Ewwww…
Here in Southern Utah, they developed a unique blend of many accents over the years, warsh being one of them. Here’s a couple of others.
You pork your car in the porking laht and enter the mahket. You then buy park chops and carn on the cob for tonight’s bahb-cue. But you realize you’re low on one of the plastic silverware types you need for dinner, so you also buy plastic farks so everyone can eat. But dinner is ruined as herricunn-force winds threaten to tear the roof off your house.
Clear? As mud?
I grew up in Maryland, inside the D.C. beltway (don’t bother to duck & cover, kids!) and I knew our first president was George Warshington until someone pointed it out to me.
On a side note, while explaining to Mrs. kdeus that Refugio, Texas, is pronounced “Refury-o”, she asked “But where’d they get the ‘R’ from?”
My riposte: “Wooster”
Despite growing up in New England, I never really heard the New England accent. However, I’m not sure I heard this in Boston, either. I was always under the impression that adding the r at the ends of words was a NE accent, and dropping them (not just at the end, obviously) was Boston.
Do you hear this in Boston? Is there a particular section you hear it in in particular?
My English prof – actually quite a good one – divided dialects in the US into “r-full” and “r-less” (I think the technical term is “rhotic” and “nonrhotic”).
The quick check is to pronounce the word “murderer.” Three syllables are “r-full.”
Here in Schenectady, there used to be a trick of dropping the middle consonants, especially in a word with doubled consonants. Thus, a baby cat was a ki’in (both vowels are a short “i”)
One of my favorite Southern Utah-isms is “Spanish Fark” for “Spanish Fork”
I’ve known a few born-and-bred Bostonians who had the “dropped R” pronunciation. (“Hey Mahk!” for “Hey, Mark!”) They were from Southie and Dorchester.
My wife worked for several years in the North End, and heard plenty of “added R’s” (“Sawr” for “saw” and “Pizzer” for “Pizza”)
I was born there (50 years ago) and back then all the school children had to be convinced that one didn’t spell the state name with an r. I escaped over 15 years ago and have almost dropped that r when I say “wash”, but not when I say “Warshington”. Perhaps in another 15 years… 
Kathy
In O Brother Where Art Thou?, which I believe is set in Mississippi, contains a line about a preacher “warshing” away sins.
I grew up in Northern Indiana…we “warshed” our hands, clothes, cars, etc…and learned in school that George “Warshington” was the first president of the US.
Over the years, I, too, have dropped the added “r” and replaced the dropped ones in library and February (both first r’s).
If you watch David Letterman, sometimes you can catch him slipping a “warsh” into his speech.
The entire population of the United States has a hard time pronouncing Aluminium. 
Listen to the Everly Brothers’ first recording of “Crying in the Rain” on Cadence Records. Don sings,
Raindrops falling from heaven
Will never warsh away my misery.
When they re-recorded it for Warner Bros., he leaves the “r” out of “wash.”
Don was born in a coal camp in the former Brownie, Kentucky.
Since we’re talking about phantom consonants (and vowels), why the heck do people put a ‘B’ in the word “supposedly” (“supposebly”)?
That really bugs me.
It’s all their fault. Those “R’s” have to go somewhere.
My MIL uses the ‘warsh’ pronounciation. I had the damndest time not laughing or poking fun the first time I heard her say it.
Granted, I’m in no position to talk as I’m from rural Nova Scotia and to hear some people around there talk, you wouldn’t know there were any consonants in the alphabet at all. I still don’t know how I escaped with my English as good as it is.
My Dad also grew up in Detroy-it, only he calls it Detroit and he pronounces warsh wash.
Shrug Go figure.
cher3, now that I think of it, in the song The Edmund Fitzgerald there’s a part that goes, “In a musty old hall in Detroit they prayed, in the Maritime Sailors’ Cathedral.” Gordon Lightfoot pronounces Detroit Detroy-it. I always thought maybe it just fit in the cadence better that way, but now you have me wondering. Maybe that’s always the way he says it, just like your Dad.
Interesting thread, I’d always assumed it came from the more rural versions of a southern accent. I usually only hear it pronounced ‘warsh’ from older folks.
What do you mean by “some people”? That in some areas there were groups of people who for one reason or another couldn’t produce that phoneme like others around them? Because a baby is born with the capability of producing any sound in any language or dialect. When the child grows up he or she habituates to only those sounds in his or her environment, and only then, over time, that makes it difficult to produce sounds which are “contrary” to those the child is hearing.
The only situation where difficulty would figure in is for non-native English speakers. Otherwise, and especially with a very common word such as wash, the speaker is using the r-coloring because it’s part of his or her dialect. Dialect variation doesn’t occur because certain individuals have trouble producing sounds which they have grown up with. (And incidentally, most non-native speakers have trouble with the r-coloring, not vice versa.)
Have you ever heard how John Kennedy pronounced “Cuba”? I think that if we could see a linguistic map of occurrences, we’d see that the opposite of r-coloring (pronouncing [/kar/] as [/ka/]) is marked more often.
Indiana is a stew-pot of accents, each with its own quirks. I was taught to avoid those habits, but many people around here warsh, then wrench (rinse) their cars. They sign their names with an ink-pin. A shrub is a booosh. The 3 pigs met the woof. The motor city is DEE-troit, to some folks. Across the Ohio River from Low-a-vull (Louisville) is Nawbny (New Albany.) In some parts of northern Indiana, they aren’t far from SHKA-ga (Chicago.)
Happy, people about my age (early 30’s or so) started doing it after Joey on friends did it in an episode. It’s a joke that he says it that way and can’t figure out that it is wrong. Some people started saying it that way like a joke and now I hear it all the time too. Can’t figure out if they are saying it with irony, or if people say it that way now so often that it has just caught on and they don’t realize they are doing it.