Square roots -- positive and negative

If you want your square-root function $\sqrt x$ to be a function, then it needs to have the properties of a function, in particular that for each element of the domain the function gives a single value from the codomain. If you take a function to be a set of ordered pairs, then each of the initial values of the pairs must appear exactly once.

So to be a function, square-root needs to be single valued; the multi-valued version is really a relation, at which point you might get into issues of principal values.

For convenience, the square root of non-negative real numbers is usually taken to be the non-negative real value, but there is nothing other than practicality to stop you from taking some other pattern. Such arbitrary choices can raise significant issues when considering, for example, cube-root functions defined on the real and complex numbers.

For positive real $x$, $\sqrt x$ denotes the positive square root of $x$, by definition. Wikipedia agrees with me on this.