[1] His father, Albert Bloch, was the only American member of Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), a group of early 20th-century European modernist painters.
In the early 1930s, he was recommended by his teacher, Werner F. Leopold, as a fieldworker for the Linguistic Atlas project led by Hans Kurath.
In 1935 he received his PhD for a thesis entitled, "The treatment of Middle English final and preconsonantal R in the present-day speech of New England".
During this period Bernard and Julia Bloch were on the editorial staff of the Linguistic Atlas of New England (1939–1943).
Bloch's work contributed to three main areas of linguistic research: phonology, syntax and the analysis of Japanese.