Comment in spectrograms via -c option do not support non-ASCII characters.
-c s results properly in s in spectrogram.png
-c 's' results properly in s in spectrogram.png
However
-c ß results properly xx in spectrogram.png
-c 'ß' results properly xx in spectrogram.png
-c s° results properly sxx in spectrogram.png
-c 's°' results properly sxx in spectrogram.png
This was reported on up to date Ubuntu Yakkety 16.10 with sox version 14.4.1-5build1 (SoX v14.4.1)
Fixing this to support Unicode (UTF-8) would allow a user more rich comments under spectrograms in their language of choice.
Ticket moved from /p/sox/bugs/280/
This would require adding support for a font rederer such as Freetype, a quite substantial undertaking. I'm moving this to feature requests instead.