I am very curious on how this affected the lives of people living in Turkey at the time. It seems like such a drastic change, having to learn a completely new alphabet and pronunciations. I remember reading how when the Soviets changed the alphabet in 1918 and removed letters such as ъ, it caused widespread protests and was strongly opposed by Russians. This was after dropping a few letters, so how did the Turks react to the change to a basically new language, and manage to successfully implement it into the country?
Ottoman Turkish script was incredibly difficult to learn, 88% of the words in Ottoman Turkish were from either Arabic or Persian, and couldn't be understood by regular Turks, regular Turks even in 1928 spoke a language that is far closer to modern Turkish than it was to Ottoman Turkish. When Ataturk changed the language he made it easier for Turks to understand and read it.
The Ottoman script only wrote down consonants and didn't write down vowels, some Turkish letters would have needed four characters to be written in Ottoman script. Only 9% of Turks could write in Ottoman script, but 33% of Turks could write in modern Turkish by 1934.
Even people who opposed Ataturk's other reforms didn't oppose the language reform, in fact even Turks that lived outside of Turkey adopted modern Turkish. Turkish schools in Cyprus (which was a British colony at the time) switched to using modern Turkish, because it was much easier to learn.
Also although the proper pronunciation of some words did change, in the vast majority of cases this was to make it closer to the way people already pronounced it. Besides, the vast majority of people pronounced the words with a regional accent, and they continued to speak with a regional accent, so it didn't affect them. In fact even nowadays Turks from the Black Sea Region speak with a very strong accent, which makes it difficult for Turks from other regions to understand them.