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This paper presents an analysis of the realisation of postvocalic /r/ in Dutch, focussing on /r/-deletion and effects of /r/ on a preceding vowel and a following consonant. Recently, detailed phonetic studies have shown that many processes traditionally attributed to phonological rules can be accounted for at the phonetic level, in terms of variation in the temporal organisation of phonetic parameters. On the basis of data from a corpus of word pairs realised by four speakers of Standard Dutch, this paper shows that such a phonetic approach is justified in the case of /r/-deletion in Dutch, and presents an analysis in terms of articulatory gestures. It will be shown that unlike existing phonological accounts, this phonetic analysis offers an insight into the relation between /r/-deletion and the contextual effects of /r/. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]