This paper investigates distributional patterns concerning the prefield and expletive subjects in two closely related languages, Swedish and Dutch, and in nonnative learners of Swedish. Native (Swedish, n=17; Dutch, n=17) and nonnative speakers (adult Dutch-speaking learners of Swedish, n=17) completed an oral picture description task and an unedited informal writing task. The overall frequencies with which constituents (subject vs. adverbial vs. object) occurred in the prefield were similar for all three groups in the oral data, though expletive subjects were more frequent in Swedish. In the written data, Swedish showed a more pronounced subject-initial pattern than Dutch. Distributional differences between Swedish and Dutch were smaller than previously reported for Swedish vs. German (Bohnacker & Rosén 2008, Bohnacker 2010). Learners mostly produced syntactically well-formed utterances but overused elliptic V1 clauses with overt postverbal subject (unattested in native Swedish), which can be attributed to syntactic transfer from L1 Dutch. Learners underused certain other word orders, namely prefield doubling (place adverbial + resumptive så) and postverbal expletive subjects, which in the oral genre were extremely frequent in native Swedish. The extent to which L2 learners produced postverbal expletives was found to be related to individual patterns in L1 Dutch, and for Dutch to be affected by regional origin (Netherlands vs. Flanders) and transferred to L2 Swedish.