How do we understand stories? How do we engage in conversation? How do we give or receive commands? There can be no doubt that language evolved for communication between people, or that language evolved for multi-modal, face-to-face communication, and that language use occurs in a rich environmental context that can ground communication for cognitive purposes. Rather than start from the position of looking for evidence of specific types of language processing "in" the brain or looking for evidence of language processing by "the brain", we suggest that it may be useful to examine cortical activity during language behavior that most closely matches conditions of evolution: language use by people at a time and place, aiming to understand and to be understood, fulfilling a purpose. The utility of this approach is that it considers how language processing, in service of specific goals and uses, interacts with a broad set of neural circuits that are involved in more general cognitive, affective, and social processing. Several completed and ongoing functional brain imaging studies that investigate language processing in different types of contextual and environmental settings will be presented.