Am I imagining the Warshington (Washington) accent?

Solution 1:

Anecdotally, in middle school, I took "Warshington State History" from a guy who spoke like this. None of my classmates used this pronunciation, but a lot of us had parents who'd moved from some other state.

KUOW (our local NPR affiliate), published a story about this "r-insertion" a few years ago.

“The phenomenon you’re asking about is what sociolinguists call r-insertion,” Wassink said by email. “R-insertion is present, but receding in Washington English.”

...

“This appears to be a retention from New England English, which was one of the dialects that forms our heritage,” Wassink said.

This is slightly hard to accept, since in the past 120 years there's never been a time when more than 10 percent of Washingtonians came from New England (and there weren't too many white people in Washington prior to that - only about 500,000 total residents in 1900 and 360,000 in 1890). A much larger portion of immigrants came from the Midwest, especially in the first half of the 20th century.

The KUOW article goes on to say,

But while the dialect that begot “warsh” and “squarsh" is fading fast in the Pacific Northwest, it still lingers in other parts of the country. You’ll hear similar examples of r-insertion in the Midwest, where some people like to “warsh” their dishes — and some might even say “garsh” instead of “gosh.”

This seems like a more compelling explanation.

We share other dialect features with Midwestern or Upper Midwestern English. Perhaps most notable is the "prevelar raising".

For speakers in much of Canada and in the North-Central and Northwestern United States, a following /ɡ/ (as in magazine, rag, bags, etc.) or /ŋ/ (as in bang, pang, gangster, angler, etc.) tenses an /æ/ as much as or more than a following nasal does. In Wisconsin, Minnesota, and central Canada, a merger of /æ/ with /eɪ/ before /ɡ/, making bag, for example, rhyme with vague, has been reported.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki//%C3%A6/_raising

I personally can attest to this feature being much more common in Washingtonian English than r-insertion, and it's been given some amount of serious study, for instance in the work of this University of Washington PhD student: "BAG, BEG, BAGEL: Prevelar raising and merger in Seattle Caucasians"