A comparison of the usage of English articles and prepositions by native speakers of Finnish and of Finland-Swedish studied the word frequencies of these grammatical categories in three levels of English essays written by school-leavers in Finnish-language and Swedish-language schools in Finland. It was hypothesized that the poorest essays written by Finnish-speakers would show lower frequencies in the use of English articles and of prepositions where simple one-to-one correspondences are difficult to establish. The frequencies of these words were expected to rise somewhat in intermediate essays and to rise to almost native-speaker level in the good essays. Because Finland-Swedish is grammatically closer to English, the figures for Finland-Swedish learners were expected to be higher than those of the Finns at the lower levels, but the figures for the best essays were not expected to differ very much. One hundred fifty essays on three levels of proficiency written by Finnish-speaking and the same number written by Swedish-speaking students were chosen to test the hypothesis. The data supported that hypothesis. It is concluded that the pattern of learning articles and prepositions in English where there are no easily established Finnish equivalents represents an avoidance by the students of linguistic features that are absent in the first language and perhaps considered redundant by the learner at early stages. The process should be considered a lack of transfer rather than indirect negative transfer of knowledge from the first language to the second. (MSE)