Paranilotic is a group of languages proposed by Carl Meinhof.
Karl Lepsius had established the Nilotic languages as a family, with Western, Eastern, and Southern branches.
Meinhof proposed that only Western were truly Nilotic, and that Eastern and Southern, which he called Nilo-Hamitic, were a mixture of (Western) Nilotic and Hamitic languages (in particular, modern Cushitic), based on racial and other non-linguistic considerations.
However, Tucker and Bryan's (1956, 1966) influential surveys resurrected Meinhof's proposal under the name Paranilotic, and that name is still sometimes found, especially in non-linguistic works.
Modern linguistics has discarded the concept of Paranilotic, seeing Nilotic more or less as Lepsius had, with three distinct branches.